Banaba

The exhaustion of phosphate reserves on Banaba Island led to hundreds more being settled in Fiji.

This just so happened to be the same year that British mining companies took the last of the guano deposits from Banaba.

Thirty-two of the islands are low-lying atolls; the 33rd, called Banaba, is a raised coral island that long ago was strip-mined for its seabird-guano-derived phosphates.

Fraser, the Australian high commissioner who came to Kiribati after serving on Nauru, a nearby island nation made desolate, like Banaba, by guano mining, said the main hope for the I-Kiribati on Tarawa is to move to the more lightly populated atolls, or to begin preparing for an orderly escape altogether.

We brought the story to life with the help of Belen de Guzman, 52, a slum dweller and river monitor in the community of Banaba.