The Curse ("Te Maraia")

You may have heard about the gradually rising tides that threaten to wipe out the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, a country of over 100,000 people spread out among a couple dozen small islands. Whatever your views of global warming, it's important to get to know the people whose homeland may be destroyed.

Spend two hours with them by watching "The Curse," the movie more than 100 of them helped me to create when my wife and I were stationed on Marakei Island in the Peace Corps. It was my final project with them, but I'm hoping it won't be the last movie made in this beautiful and amazing country.

As a health volunteer I had to pick a topic for the movie that related to my job, so I chose alcohol abuse — a problem in most countries — and decided to explore it in a humorous way. I hope you find the movie entertaining as a fictional story. But more important, I hope you learn something true about the I-Kiribati people. By the time the credits roll, you may have come to agree with me that the Kiribati are a generous, warm, clever, and fun-loving people who deserve to live out their lives in peace — without having to leave everything behind to live in a Westernized country.

The Kiribati people are survivors like no one I have ever met. But can they survive global warming? Get involved and continue to learn about their plight.