WHEN I GOT back to the Ministry the electricity was still down. Our open plan office was a cavernous space, quiet now without the hum of the air conditioning and the clickety-clack of the one desktop computer. The bags I carried came under scrutiny – there was little else to do. I was single and childless and my sister had just had a son back in Australia so the bags were full of delightful ‘little’ things that got my Marshallese colleagues clucking. I’d particularly fallen in love with one tiny T-shirt at the one tiny department store on the island. The stencil was bright and cheerful: a pink hermit crab and a startled, elongated green fish over three wavy blue lines representing the water all around us. Om eo im tak eo, it read.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.