Nauruans

With few job opportunities, most Nauruans spend their days watching television.

For secondary and university education, most Nauruans' children must go abroad.

Nauruans also participate in soccer and softball.

Nauruans are doing it tough.

Nauruans also have their own distinct Pacific language called Nauruan, though most people speak or understand English.

The indigenous Nauruans are both a mosaic and mixture of groups from all three categories- with cultural influence stemming primarily from Micronesia.

The indigenous Nauruans are a mixture of three Pacific ethnic groups: Melanesian, Micronesian and Polynesian.

Nauruans are the most obese people in the world: 97 per cent of men and 93 per cent of women are overweight or obese.

The official language of Nauru is Nauruan, a distinct Pacific island language, which is spoken by 96 per cent of ethnic Nauruans at home.

They established a rationing system: Japanese workers and Nauruans where entitled to 900 grams of rice and 45 grams of beef per day, whereas the Chinese had smaller rations.

Most of the phosphate was taken by colonial masters Australia, New Zealand and Britain, but after independence in 1968 Nauruans continued the mining through to today, and now only a few more years' supply remains.

Nauruans worry about how the trust funds are being invested, and their concern has only grown in light of recent examples of millions of dollars being frittered away, most publicly in 1993 when the Government invested more than $2 million in a failed London musical based on the life of Leonardo da Vinci.

In February 2008, the Foreign Affairs minister, Dr. Kieren Keke, stated that the closure would result in 100 Nauruans losing their jobs, and would affect 10 per cent of the island's population directly or indirectly: "We have got a huge number of families that are suddenly going to be without any income.