Review: "Time on a Tiny Island" by Amy Muscoplat

Time on a Tiny Island by Amy Muscoplat
Published March 2025 via Joyfestival Industries
★★★

In the mid-90s, stuck in an unsatisfying job, Muscoplat took a leap—she applied to serve in the Peace Corps. She was accepted and sent to Kiribati, where she spent two years working on health projects on Marakei Island.

The Peace Corps are one of those maybe-in-another-life things for me (or maybe-after-retirement, but that feels like another life too, so...), and I love reading about other people's experiences doing it. The best Peace Corps books, to me, have always been the ones where the writer focuses on the people around them and doesn't get hung up on trying to make a big difference. That is: If I've learned one thing about reading so much about the Peace Corps, it's that the projects for which people are officially hired are not necessarily things that will make a long-term impact—they might start conversations, or they might not; mostly the things that last are the cultural learnings.

I know precious little about Kiribati, and it was so interesting to read about so much of Muscoplat's work being about latrines—because although there were flush toilets on Tarawa (the country's capital), the infrastructure simply wasn't there on the less populated islands. In practice, this meant a lot of people simply used the beach, as had been done for centuries, and there was still resistance to using latrines (widespread belief that the ocean would take away waste, concerns about freshwater contamination, etc.). Muscoplat talks a little bit about her work to encourage people to use latrines, and to get more latrines put in, but she knew that she wasn't going to change centuries of culture all by herself, and much of the material is more about, simply, what it was to live in this culture so different from her own. (Like: traveling to New Zealand with a friend from Kiribati, and the friend having to buy flip-flops after being told that she probably wouldn't be let on the plane barefoot; barefoot was simply a norm on Marakei.)

Maybe my favorite throwaway moment: This was the 90s, so communication was mostly limited to letters, and Muscoplat mentions that a friend sent a care package containing...an audiotape of relaxing ocean sounds. A bit like sending coal to Newcastle, isn't it?

Anyway, a nice addition to the Peace Corps bookverse. More fuel for dreams of another life...