In the Mountains of Timor-Leste

The drive to Macu's home village had two phases: first we drove along the coast to Baucau, then we headed inland and up into the mountains. Timor is not well-mapped but you can gain a sense of our location on this Google map. The road up the mountains reminded me a bit of the drive from the Indian border to Kathmandu. The big difference is that in Nepal the roads were reasonably well maintained (ie. they didn't have pot holes a metre deep as in Timor-Leste) and the plunge to certain death was only about 500m straight down, rather than 1500m as in Timor-Leste. This is not a road for the faint-hearted.

In all, it took us about 8 hours to travel from Dili to Osso Huna in the sub-district of Baguia. Macu's village is situated on the slopes of Mt Matebian, which is the second-highest mountain in Timor. During the resistance against Indonesian occupation, this area was a key stronghold of Falentil (the armed wing of Fretilin) as the treacherous terrain made pursuit of the guerrillas difficult. The Timorese government has just completed a road through Osso Huna, which spared us a two-hour walk from Baguia town. Progress is coming to Baguia.

Macu’s family’s house was typical of the village. It had dirt floors, walls of bamboo and a roof made of palm fronds. There was no electricity, running water or mobile phone reception. The photo on the right shows the kitchen - two fires surrounded by stones holding up the pots. The puppies sleep next to the fire most of the time as it can be quite cool in the mountains.

The bathroom (left) consists of three corrugated iron walls (no roof), a curtain for the fourth wall, a slatted bamboo floor and a drum with water coming via gravity directly from a nearby stream. Thirty years ago in Malaysia, my stepmother Crina taught me how to wash in this way without ruining the water for everyone else. A very useful lesson.

Dinner that night was to be a goat which had been purchased especially for the occasion. As the honoured guest I was asked how I wanted it killed. This is not a question I'd thought about much before. I asked what the options were and was told that they could hang it by its neck until it was dead, or cut its throat. I guess that letting it die naturally in its sleep was not a third option. So I chose throat-cutting as I thought that it would be quicker and cleaner. I photographed the whole business from patting the goat to serving it in bowls, but for this blog I will just post the first picture, the goat being patted. After being killed the goat was placed whole on a roaring fire of palm leaves, while the hair was scraped off the skin. When it was smooth, it was butchered in a neat and careful manner. Every part of the goat was consumed although I confess that I turned down the offer of the goat's windpipe, claiming that I was full. As generous hosts, Macu's family were concerned that I had not eaten enough and they cheerfully offered to kill one of the puppies for me to eat later in the evening. I declined the offer, but I guess we know the eventual fate of those little puppies sleeping by the fire. One day they’ll be closer to the fire than they are now.


The people were incredibly friendly and keen to show me their lives. Everywhere I went I was followed by a small crowd of children, who periodically shouted out 'melai' and giggled with delight when I smiled back at them. 'Melai' means 'foreigner', but is a descriptive term rather than an insulting one. Most Timorese refer to each by their relative positions (eg. sister, auntie) rather than use their names, and 'melai' is an extension of that. My 'position' in the village was that of foreigner.
One day Macu and I walked to the next village to visit her grandmother. The photo on the left is part of the crowd of children who followed us the whole way, out of sheer curiosity to see what the funny foreigner would do next. Sometimes I made funny faces, which they thought was hysterical and they shrieked with laughter. They don't get many melais in this part of the mountains and certainly not ones that can make fish faces.

We visited Macu's grandmother and her traditional house is shown at right. I conversed through Macu, since my combination of English and Bahasa Indonesia (the two 'working languages' of Timor-Leste) was useless in an area so remote that no-one even spoke the 'national' language of Tetum, let alone foreign languages. Macu’s grandmother was a gracious old lady who was curious about why a foreigner would bother to come to such a place as her village. It was hard to communicate how delighted I was just to meet them and share their meals. I don't think she was much wiser about my visit when I left. And I think she was downright confused when I showed the local children how to hypnotise a chicken. OK I’ll admit that imparting that particular skill is not high on the priority list of international aid agencies, but surely all knowledge is useful, right?

We visited Macu's aunt, whose house had been destroyed by fire a few weeks earlier. She literally owned nothing but the clothes she stood up in. She was very apologetic that she couldn't offer us anything to drink, but she had no possessions of any kind. I asked Macu if it was appropriate for me to give her aunt some money to help out - since no-one else in the village seemed to have money (it's basically a subsistence economy) and no-one else had 'spare' clothes to give her. Her family were happy to feed her and provide her with shelter, but they were all so poor that they could not help in any material way. Macu said that it was OK to give her money and say that it was 'to buy a sarong'. So I gave her $20, which is about two months income in that area. She protested but Macu told her it was OK to take money from me since I was very rich! So we all finished with our dignity intact.

We also visited the local junior high school (pictured right). The salaries of two of the teachers are paid by the Friends of Baguia, a Melbourne-based community organisation that raises funds for this area. The Timorese government cannot afford to pay all the teachers required. In some villages the teachers have to work for free, while they negotiate with the government. In Baguia they are fortunate in having some outside support.


One day an uncle of Macu’s built a new house. The whole village and several nearby ones were invited to participate. It took perhaps 100 people one whole day to build the new house. One photo shows some of the men stripping the leaves from huge palm fronds to make the roof. Other men had gathered the palm fronds and still others tied the leaves into bundles.
Another photo shows the men putting the roof on the house. The photo (below) shows some of the dozens of women who were constantly cooking and feeding the men. Everyone had a job to do.

On my last night in the village, a huge swarm of fireflies came to the jungle behind the house. It was pitch-black and the thousands of little flashing lights darting about the jungle was an awesome sight. Then a thunderstorm started to form behind us, so the fireflies' dance was punctuated with great flashes of lightning. The whole jungle was illuminated for half a second, all the trees were suddenly visible and the fireflies invisible. Then the darkness came back - the jungle disappeared and the fireflies were there again, flashing and darting about. It was an amazing sight.

Finally, it was time for us to return to Dili, after a fascinating few days in the mountains, experiencing a very different lifestyle to that of Canberra. We are told that within six months, Osso Huna will have electricity, and indeed the power poles have already been put up. I wonder how life will change for Macu’s family when they have access to electricity and possibly television? Whatever happens, it won’t be the same.

First Week in Dili

I've been in Dili just over a week now, and it's been quite an experience. It is in some ways a typically poor Southeast Asian town, with shabby little huts, open drains, burning piles of rubbish and stray dogs wandering about. What is unique about Dili is the overwhelming presence of the UN. The place is swarming with expats, and I estimate that about half of the expats I've spoken with are from the UN. The rest fall into the same category as me, which is volunteer for an NGO. I counted cars one afternoon out of curiosity - 1 in 10 vehicles that drove by were white UN vehicles. Many of the other vehicles were little yellow taxis, government vehicles and vehicles belonging to international aid agencies. Very different from other places I've been recently.

The UN are visible in the streets, particularly the UN police, of which there seem to be hundreds. The Timorese police and their military are also present in large numbers. The presence of all these uniformed men and women, coupled with the burnt-out buildings, is a constant reminder that there has only been peace in Dili for a relatively short time. Friends give me dire warnings about not venturing out after dark, and for now, I will take them at their word.


I'm volunteering with a local NGO called Alola Foundation, which focuses on improving women's and children's health, education and economics. East Timor has the 2nd highest maternal mortality rate in Asia, after Afghanistan, and my job is to write and edit proposals to seek grants from donor agencies for projects to address maternal and infant mortality. I've visited the Dili National Hospital and the Bairo Pite Clinic. These are the two places where women can give birth with the aid of trained personnel. The maternity ward of the Dili National Hospital, shown below, is clean and well-maintained, and the staff are committed and well-trained.
The problem is that there are so few beds and the staff are so over-worked. There are only two obstetricians in the entire country. Sometimes the maternity ward is so full that the staff lay mattresses on the floor of the ward, or in the corridor, and women give birth there. Women and their babies are usually sent home in less than 24 hours, to make room for the next ones. There are so few places like Dili National Hospital that only about 20% of women can deliver their babies in any kind of health facility. This is a major contributor to the very high death rate for mothers and their babies.

In my time off from work, I mostly go scuba-diving, or sit in the bar of the pub with other scuba-divers talking about scuba-diving. East Timor has some brilliant dive sites. The coral at Christo Rei (one end of Dili harbour with a giant statue of Christ on it) is the best I've seen. Since it's wet season, the visibility is not great (3-6m or so) but what we can see close up is outstanding. I wish I had Lyndal's underwater camera to show the sites and sights. You might like to visit this website and look at their photos.

Other than working, diving, chatting in bars and swimming, there are the usual bizarre expat activities of quiz nights, karaoke and cards (not at the same time). These are not things I would usually do at home, but then I don't scuba dive much in Canberra either. :-)

Today I am heading off to the mountains to visit the home village of my friend Macu. There is no electricity, mobile coverage or internet, and not really much of a road either. It will take us 8 hours to get there. This will be interesting!

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Singapore

On 6th January I left the Philippines, en route to East Timor. There are very few flights into and out of this small, troubled country and despite booking weeks earlier, I was ended up spending four days in Singapore waiting for my flight. I actually quite like Singapore and opted to spend the four days there rather than in Manila, of which I am not quite so fond.


I stayed in Chinatown, which was quite fun, as it is only a few days before Chinese New Year and everyone was getting ready for the big celebrations. The photo at the top shows a temporary stall in the process of being set up, to sell CNY decorations.


I visited the main religious sites nearby in Chinatown: the Buddhist Temple of the Holy Relic of Buddha's Tooth (some of the ornate roof shown above, and one of the thousands of statues of Buddha shown at the left); the Hindu Mariamma temple (below) and the Jamae Masjid (too dull to photograph).



Despite the gorgeous decorations of the alternative faiths, I elected to attend an Anglican church on Sunday, St Andrew's Cathedral (exterior left). It looked almost identical to every 19th century British church I had seen in India and Pakistan - a large, pale Gothic structure with lots of ceiling fans.

What else do I like about Singapore, apart from its choice of religions? Well, a lot of the architecture in Chinatown is quite quirky. It's a mixture of 19th century British and 18th century Chinese, with lots of 21st century globalism thrown in. For some reason blogger is not letting me upload photos at the moment, so I'll add some examples later. I like the fact that it is in some ways very Westernised with clean drinking water and loads of educated inhabitants who all speak English to some degree, but in other ways it is so totally Asian, with a wide range of exotic goods for sale and some really strange food and medicines (think of deer tendons and dried whole geckos as appetizers). The range of food is brilliant, and I was able to satisfy my craving for Indian food after eating at many Chinese hawker stalls.

I've got many happy memories of visiting Singapore with my kids years ago too, but now it was time for me to leave. I arrived today in East Timor, and entered another world altogether.

Worshipping in Science City of Munoz

My friend and former work colleague, Romeo, is a pastor at his church, so it was natural that I attended his church for Sunday worship. I opted to attend the English-language service, but surprisingly, all the songs were in Tagalog (Filipino). I had no idea how to pronounce the words and didn't recognise the tunes, so I just mumbled away throughout the verses. Then when the chorus came around I belted out 'Hallelujah' as often as necessary, before going back to mumbling. I felt like Mr Bean in his famous church sketch, where 'hallelujah' is the only bit of the song he knows.

No-one seemed to notice or mind my singing, and they all made me feel very welcome.


A few days later, several of the church members decided to do a gospel mission to a barrio (a poor village or slum). The local Catholic priest had stopped visiting the area and this group of evangelical Christians wanted to share their message. They took me along with them, which was a bit of a surprise for the barrio children, many of whom had not seen a foreigner at close quarters before. I just stood in the background while one of our group gave an empassioned gospel message to the 30 or so people gathered there. Another member of the group gave her testimony and then everyone prayed together. Finally, drinks and cakes were handed out, much to the delight of the children.


Copies of the New Testament in Tagalog were also handed out, but some people commented that they could not read them since their eyesight was so bad. The woman who had given her testimony then made a commitment to return in a few weeks with her husband, who was doctor, and give them all free medical check-ups and eye tests. She will buy glasses for all the villagers who need them, at a cost of about 60c each, but free to the villagers. Soon they'll be able to read the New Testament and anything else they like. It's amazing the difference that a small amount of money can make to the lives of some people.

Buffaloes and Fish

I visited the Philippine Carabao Centre, which is trying to improve the milk production of carabao (water buffalo). Currently 99% of milk consumed in the Philippines is imported, so they are trying to become self-sufficient. They are doing this by cross-breeding the native buffaloes with ones from India, where the milk production is much higher.

They are also using IVF to improve the herd, and have been trying to clone the best animals for a while. So far they have not managed to have a live calf from the cloning, but they are very close, with several foetuses making it to 4 or 5 months of gestation. Again, I asked the question about public perception about cloning, given the hysteria in the UK in particular. The researcher said that there was no such concern here in the Philippines. It did not attract any more attention than IVF did.


My next stop was the Freshwater Aquatic Centre, where Afican fish called telapia are bred. I was introduced to a member of the first batch of telapia brought over from Africa some 16 years ago. He was so old that he wasn't used for breeding any more, but many of the thousands of telapia in Filipino fish farms today are his descendants. The breeding methods here are of the conventional type. They measure all the characteristcs of a batches of fish bred at the centre (length, weight, speed of maturation, etc) then they pick the best ones and use them to breed the next generation. In this way they have increased the average size of a telapia by 40% in the past 16 years. Like all the other centres that I visited, they have a gene bank and keep samples of fish eggs and sperm from every year of breeding.


Finally, I stopped to photograpah the old library of Central State Luzon University, which was destroyed in an earthquake in 1990. It demonstrates the contrasts at this university. On the one hand there is world-class research in zoonotic diseases and nutrition using advanced techniques like genetic modification and animal cloning. On the other hand, the dormitories only have running water at certain times of the day and mosquitoes at all times of the day, and no-one had quite gotten around to clearing up the rubble from the old library. It wasn't a monument, it just wasn't a priority either.

Rice and Goats

Thanks to the generosity of Romeo and his colleagues, I spend two days touring the various research facilities of the Central Luzon State University in the Science City of Munoz.


I visited the Philippines Rice Research Institute, or PhilRice, and was shown the ways in which they are improving rice breeds to resist insects, grow faster, need less fertiliser and so on. The photo shows part of their gene bank of rice varities. I was particularly interested in Golden Rice, which is a genetically modified form of rice that helps to prevent blindness in children. It has a higher dose of a precursor to Vitamin A, so that people who eat it can make more Vitamin A. About half of Filipino children suffer from Vitamin A deficiency, and this can lead to blindness if severe. Golden Rice is one way of addressing this problem in a country where rice contributes about 40% of the calories in the average diet. I asked the researchers about the public reaction to GM foods and they said that there had been no adverse public reaction. There is not the same kind of uninformed hysteria about GM foods in Asia as there is in Europe.


One of the products marketed by PhilRice is tapuy, or rice wine. The chap who was giving me the tour of PhilRice was the artist who, amongst other things, designed bottle labels. He showed me his labels for the wine, and lamented the fact that the Filipino Cabinet had apparently refused to allow production of his label. The label had a drawing of a Filipino indigenous person drinking rice wine. The cabinet apparently felt that it was politically incorrect to show an indigenous person drinking alcohol in public. And so the label was changed to a picture of some rice. The photo shows the artist's labels on the right with the new ones on the left.


I visited the Small Ruminants Centre where I met a bunch of goats of varying breeds. The Centre also had ten sheep, grazing under the tamarind trees. I told the researcher that my family were sheep farmers and he asked how many sheep my family owned. I said 'about 4,000' and he laughed and said something like, 'oh for a minute there I thought you said 4,000'. I nodded and said that was correct - about 4,000 sheep on about 2,000 acres. The look he gave me was priceless. He'd clearly never heard of such things. I had to explain that in Australian terms it wasn't a particularly big farm, but I don't think he believed me.

New Year in Baguio

On New Year's Eve I went to Baguio, at 1500m it was a welcome change from the high temperatures below. I travelled (in a minivan, for four hours) with two Filipino families. Romeo is another former wokr colleague of mine, and there was his wife and two children, plus another family, bringing the total to ten.

The road to Baguio is incredibly winding and steep. It reminded me a lot of the road to Kathmandu, about which I've written before. Baguio was quite pleasant. We visited the Philippine Military Academy, which Lyndal's friend Kyle, with whom we spent Christmas in Cebu, attends now that he had completed his Australian training. We saw a parade rehearsal which interested me very much, but perhaps not so much for Romeo and his family.

After an evening meal we all watched a magnificent fireworks display at Burnham Park in the centre of the city. This was made all the more interesting by the fact that the industrial-strength fireworks were launched from right in front of the audience, with bits of burning rockets landing repeatedly amongst the crowd. This year over 700 people were injured by fireworks on New Year's Eve in the Philippines, and I am not surprised!



The rest of the evening was comparatively quiet and we went sightseeing again the next day. One of the places we visited was the Botanical Gardens. In the Philippines it seems that almost every government official is armed, regardless of the necessity. The photo shows a gardener at the Botanical Gardens cleaning out a moat around a fountain. Note the pistol on the hip.


A very quiet New Year's Day was rounded off by rowing around an artificial lake, along with about 500 other people, jampacked together. Then we headed back down the long and winding road to the Science City of Munoz.

Manila and Southern Luzon

We headed off to Manila on Boxing Day, for Lyndal's last couple of days in the Philippines. They didn't turn out quite how we expected.


We visited Rizal Park in the afternoon, which was heaving with people picnicking. We paid to visit the Japanese Gardens, to discover that they had probably not been maintained since the day they were planted. The pond was empty, most of the plants dead, and the living things were mainly weeds. As we left, the gatekeeper told us that it would be rehabilated 'next year'. Yet they still charged an admission fee to view a dead garden. Pretty well everything else seemed to be closed, despite signs saying that they were open. So we didn't see a lot of Manila.

The next day was (what can I say?) an experience. We were collected at our hotel at 9am by a former work colleague of mine, and driven around southern Luzon for 13 hours, returning at 10pm. In those 13 hours we spent 30 minutes on top of a hill trying to peer through the fog at the valley below, 30 minutes standing outside a faith healing centre which we couldn't enter because we were wearing shorts, and 15 minutes each in two shops that sold wooden carvings. The rest of the time was taken up by driving. I'm not kidding. It's just as well that my work colleague is a vet, because he doesn't have a career ahead of him as a tour guide. :-)


The photo shows the guest hotel outside the faith healing centre, which is shaped like Noah's Ark, and surrounded by concrete statues of pairs of animals.

Lyndal headed off to Australia the next day, and in the afternoon I spent two hours being driven to an art gallery where we stayed for 45 minutes, then two hours driving to the accommodation. My enduring memory of the Philippines will be sitting in minivans, wondering when we are going to arrive.


I visited the National Musem of the Filipino People the following day (yes, two hour drive there and two hours drive back). This was actually quite interesting (the museum, not the drive) and their displays on Filipino pre-history were world-class. We then went to Intramuros, the ancient Spanish centre of Manila, but as it was now dark, it was hard to see much. The two old churches there were closed as they had been booked for weddings. The photo shows a flower girl at a wedding in one of the churches we didn't get to see.


Finally, I had an interesting day, touring a medical research facility, since this is my connection with my work colleague. I saw them making vaccines, testing the products, creating antivenin for King Cobras and dissecting the heads of rabid dogs. The photo shows rabbits waiting to have their temperature taken, after being vaccinated against King Cobra venom. Perhaps it's not on the major tourist trails, but I found all this really interesting, and it didn't involve sitting in a minivan.

That was to come later in the day. After a five hour drive I arrived in the Science City of Munoz in central Luzon, to spend some time with another Filipino work colleague and his famiy.