Photo: Tommy Trenchard for NPR. Retrieved from npr.org

When 62-year-old fisherman Kpana Charlie has finished sorting through the day’s catch and patching up the holes in his nets, he likes to settle into a weathered wooden chair on his front porch and let his mind drift back to his childhood. Back then, his home on Sierra Leone’s Nyangai Island seemed like paradise.

He spent endless hours playing with his friends on the island’s dazzling white beaches or splashing about in the warm, green sea. He liked to kick around a soccer ball on the sports field in his village, and in mango season, he would shimmy up the trees to collect their bountiful fruit. Whenever he wanted to avoid having to do his homework, he could simply disappear into the dense forest that covered much of the island.

Today, Nyangai is disappearing before his very eyes, swallowed up by the relentless sea. As recently as ten years ago, it still measured some 2,300 feet from end to end. What’s left today is a patch of sand barely 300 feet long and 250 wide. The forests are gone, swamped by saltwater. The soccer field lies under water for 22 hours of the day. And the land on which Charlie’s family home once stood, the home he was born in, has long since vanished beneath the waves. In as little as two years, Charlie fears, Nyangai may no longer exist at all.