Virtual reality and metaverses are great for letting people be immersed in places where they are not physically in. That feature would certainly be useful for the world to discover Nauru. One of the most remote countries in the world, it is the least visited country in the world and is also the 3rd smallest in the world in terms of size. Oh, and I forgot to mention one thing, it's covered in poop or at least it was. Yes, you read it right, poop! This week’s Pub Convos, let's have a conversation about this wonderful island nation, Nauru
The Important Things
Nauru is situated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 300 km away from its nearest neighbour Kiribati. The entire country consists of only one island and this island is about 20km2 with a perimeter of less than 20km. Which means that a half marathon is longer than the entire perimeter of the island.
The country does not have an official capital city but a de facto one called Yaren. Yaren is situated in the southwest corner of the island and has around 1000 people living in it. The reason Yaren is widely known as the capital is because the parliamentary buildings are there, simple as that.
It has a population of around 10,000 people, they are made up of mainly ethnic Nauruans. However, surprisingly around 8% of the population are actually Han Chinese. English is widely spoken in Nauru as it is used for government, but they do have a native language called Nauruan which is rarely used outside of the country.
The Poop
Okay then so what’s the deal with the poop. One of the most abundant minerals in Nauru is phosphate. The land is rich in phosphate due to the large amount of guano droppings from migrating birds. Due to the abundance of it the government decided to mine it and sell it which made a lot of money as the top-level phosphate is relatively easy to mine. After years of relying on this industry as primary income for the country, the phosphate deposits ran out, leaving Nauru without a primary income source and an environmentally decimated island.
Without the ability to sell essentially what is bird poop, the government had to come up with another source of income. In comes, the Pacific Solution that made Nauru into an outsource detention centre. Australia, one of its closest allies, decide that it would pay Nauru to build a detention centre and hold asylum seekers who sought after refuge in Australia by sea. The ethics and morality of this is widely discussed and is a conversation for another day but do note that this is actually a thing.
FOOD!
Right so enough about all this boring stuff, let’s talk about food in Nauru. Surely that would lighten the mood. No, due to the limited arable land in Nauru, most of Nauru gets its food imported from New Zealand and Australia by sea. This means fresh food is hard to come by as it would need to survive weeks in a container. Therefore, Nauruans default to canned food which is not the best when it comes to nutrition, making it one of the most obese nations according to the WHO.
Another interesting fact about food in Nauru is that it has more than 100 Chinese restaurants on the island. Which is a lot considering there are only 10,000 people in the country.
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