Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Nauru



A few days ago, Fab posted a note in the header saying that we'd had our first visit from Nauru, a small island nation off the coast of Australia.  That sounded like a fun, quirky, fact, and raised intriguing questions: do we have a reader from a university there?  Or maybe someone was on vacation there and checked in? 

Sadly, thanks to an article I read today, I can now imagine a couple of other explanations: if there's internet access available to them (questionable, but possible; apparently children are going to school), then a very, very bored (or very desperate, perhaps for anything resembling a college education) refugee may have reached us in the course of browsing the internet. Or maybe someone from the joint Amnesty International/Human Rights Watch delegation that visited in July is a fan? I suppose that would speak well of us, but still, that neat little fact just acquired some considerably more troubling  associations. 

--Cassandra

5 comments:

  1. I missed the note in the header, and consequently was quite confused when Cassandra brought up Nauru in a comment the other day. It all makes sense now, and I look forward to reading these linked items.

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  2. By the way, a remote island with poor internet access, and even poorer access to televised campaign coverage, sounds pretty good about now. Please realize that I am only riffing on the picture, (blissfully?) ignorant of what's really going on there.

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    Replies
    1. I thought it was an image of the UK 20 years from now: the twin impact of Brexit and global warming..."a remote island with poor internet access", indeed.

      But, yeah, the Aussies don't have the best reputation for dealing with refugees, tbh.

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    2. It does look like it has its attractions, though apparently the satellite view is a bit deceptive (past environmental/economic damage due to mining; future threat from, yes, global warming). In short, possibly an interesting place to visit for those of us free to come and go as we please (and with somewhere more stable/prosperous to go back to), but maybe not the best place to live, and certainly not a good place to be detained (is there a good place to be detained? I suppose there are at least better and worse places).

      And according to Wikipedia, it does have a university (or at least a branch campus of an Australian university).

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