By lucky chance, Red Beach teenager Charlie Thomas finds herself in one of the safest places on earth as Covid-19 has the world in its grip – she is living on an isolated Hawaiian atoll with a small group of volunteers dedicated to environmental restoration, including cleaning up rubbish.
Charlie, 18, left NZ for Kure atoll in February and will remain there until October (HM February 5). She is with three other field workers living in a cabin with no power, internet or fresh food, although they have enough food and other supplies to last until the end of the year.
Communication between Charlie and her family has been infrequent, due to the lack of internet access, but her mother, Jeanette, says the team are aware of coronavirus but not of the scale of its impact.
In New Zealand, isolation has reduced people’s world to their homes, outdoor areas close by, internet communications and supermarkets. By contrast, Charlie’s world view on the remote atoll has expanded. It is filled with observing sealife and birds, as well as working on a cleanup effort.
Recently Charlie was able to get a portion of her diary to her family, in which she talks about the blurring of lines between humans and nature in a place that people rarely visit.
“The more I’ve observed and the more that I have stood back and tried to be insignificant, the more that the line between human life and life in the natural world begins to change for me,” Charlie says. “Here, we are invisible. I wait on the side of the path for an albatross to walk past, or I crouch motionless along the waterline so as not to disturb a sleeping monk seal. Life’s priorities have changed. My life has never much revolved around social or technological needs, but here they seem to not exist at all. The weather, the birds, the sea around us, control our every move. It’s the island that makes our decisions for us. I like it that way. When I go outside I know that if I respect what is around me it will, in turn, take care of me. For some people, that symbiotic relationship has been lost. We have lost touch with the ground that we walk on. Mother Nature has no say in the matter anymore and as a result, the human race is having to fend for itself.”
