Ebeye has been called "the slum of the Pacific." With roughly 15,000 people crowded onto an island barely half a mile long and a few hundred metres wide, it is one of the most densely populated places on earth. The population is almost entirely Marshallese — the workforce and families who came to Kwajalein for work but are barred from living on the American base itself.
The contrast with Kwajalein Island, a short ferry ride away, is stark: manicured American suburbia on one side of the lagoon, severe overcrowding and poverty on the other. Services, sanitation, and infrastructure have historically struggled to keep pace with the population, which has grown enormously since the US took control of Kwajalein.
A visit to Ebeye is not "tourism" in any comfortable sense, but it is an honest window into the human cost of the atoll's unusual political arrangement. Ebeye is accessible by the inter-island ferry for those who are permitted to be on the atoll in the first place.