It seemed unlikely that they would send the beer back

From The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost, page 75. The Minister of Health's attitude is a refreshing concern about the interests of the citizens that puts his OECD peers to shame.

Despite the excesses though, I found I quite liked the easygoing, anything goes, why-not-have-another-beer air of Tarawa. It was refreshingly different from the prissiness that characterizes life in the Northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. Government leaders in Kiribati were of an entirely different disposition than the lifeless ogres of Washington. At one function, I asked the minister of health why cigarettes were so cheap in Kiribati. We both had a cigarette in one hand and a can of Victoria Bitter in the other. "Because otherwise the people can't afford them," he said, an answer I liked very much. At the same event, the secretary of health, a doctor by training and a politician by temperament, insisted that we take a few beers with us for the drive home. "I always like to have one for the road," he said, waving us off. Some might regard this as reprehensible, but I think this why-the-fuck-not attitude was reflective of a certain joie de vivre. The daily consumption of several cans of Victoria Bitter became an integral part of my well-being, possibly because I am of Dutch-Czech stock and thus warmly inclined toward beer, but also because it is immensely fun to quaff beers with your loved one while sitting at reef's edge watching the world's most spectacular sunsets. Plus, beer tends to be parasite-free and calorie-laden, two very useful attributes in Tarawa.

So imagine my despair when I walked into the Angirota Store to buy a six-pack only to be confronted by a glaringly empty refrigerator. "Bia?" I asked hopefully, using the I-Kiribati word for beer, which sounds very much like the Australian word for beer. "Akia," I was told. Akia is the most commonly used word in the Kiribati language, which can be roughly translated as "unavailable." The words akia te bia are the most painful words I have heard spoken. The owner of the shop, Bourere, a large man with the grooviest side-burns this side of the dateline, was as stunned as I was. As the only local capitalist on the island, he was no doubt aware of what the absence of beer would do to his profit margins.

"What happened?" I asked him.

"Kiritimati Island," he muttered darkly. "They sent the beer to Kirimati Island."

Kirimati Island was approximately two thousand miles east of Tarawa. It seemed unlikely that they would send the beer back.