My 12 days of Christmas

12 stations of the cross we struggled past up to the Jesus statue on Christmas Eve

11 seconds (average length of time between homemade firecrackers being let off on Christmas Eve)

10 ingredients in our homemade sangria for Orphans Christmas lunch

9 people to clear a landslide on the cliffside road from Baucau to Dili (with 44 more people watching on encouragingly)

8 somewhat sunburned legs courtesy of three days spent in Baucau

7 Bangladeshi UN soldiers walking around Baucau beach toting guns and camera phones

6 hours spent (approximately) at the piscina (Portuguese for amazing pool refilled every day with fresh spring water) in Baucau

5 neighbours to escort us to open air mass at Balide, Dili

4 girls in their Sunday best for Christmas Eve mass with the neighbours

3 nativity scenes (on average) on every street in Dili

2 skype calls home on Christmas Day

1 partner in crime

Belinda, soon-to-be-professional diver, currently visiting from Australia

The Alain de Botton of Dili

When in need of some retail therapy in Dili, we head to Halilaran, a market towards the hills that sells everything from seaweed to tobacco to backpacks. This local Westfield, sans air con and piped music, has an extensive secondhand clothing section.

My local Westfield

I always start off looking for clothes but invariably get distracted by the smorgasboard of philosophies on display in the form of T-shirts. It seems that the T-shirt, often overlooked in Australia, is the perfect vehicle for sharing philosophical thought with the masses – portable, washable, and regularly on display for public consumption.

I feel the calling to become the Alain de Botton of Dili’s clothing markets, although right now I can’t seem to make much sense of what I’m finding. They range from lovely sentiments (which may or may not make sense): 

(I feel like if I thought about this one for long enough I might attain nirvana)

To delightful non-sequiturs:

To the mildly disturbing/possibly psychotic:

(extra points for use of punctuation) 

There are many things in your HEART you can never tell to another person. 

They are you, your private joys and sorrows, 

AND YOU CAN NEVER TELL THEM. 

You cheapen yourself, 

THE INSIDE OF YOURSELF, 

when you tell them.

By the time we get out of Halilaran market, I always feel dazed, confused and on the brink of a major philosophical discovery. Perhaps after 10 more months in Timor-Leste I’ll be able to understand the hidden meanings of these t-shirts and translate them into erudite and witty insights, to be spoken in a posh English accent.

A highly irregular Sunday night

Okay, thank you universe. I get it. I realise my mistake.

I now know you shouldn’t tempt fate by describing a ‘typical’ Sunday night, as if its little eccentricities are the most amusing of curve balls that life could throw at you. Because the very next Sunday night YOUR HOUSE WILL BE FLOODED!

Our evening routine with our neighbours (English lessons, singing, dancing, drawing, the kids cooking us all dinner) was underway as usual last night. Until I heard a voice saying ‘Joey, Joey’ and felt a little hand tugging at my arm, drawing my attention to the fact that putrid brown water was flooding in underneath one of our side doors.

It had been raining for a while but it never occurred to me that the rain outside was in the process of flooding our neighbourhood and causing everyone else’s mud to flow down to our house. With water flowing in from two side doors, and our front courtyard rapidly becoming a swimming pool, I must confess I had a little First World panic (you know the type, when you run around freaking out about a situation over which you have no control, hoping someone else will catch on and share the panic with you).

Before long our bathroom, kitchen and dining room was under about a foot of rising water. The rest of the house – our loungeroom and bedrooms – is a step above. That’s a step I am incredibly grateful for, because we were about 10cm away from having floating beds (okay, might be a bit of an exaggeration but this was a Sunday night after all. Sunday nights are meant for cups of tea and watching whatever English telemovie is on ABC).

Thankfully it turns out that our posse of kids, aside from being resourceful cooks, are also the (junior) Timorese version of the SAS. There were kids in our dining room filling up garbage bins with water to try and make the level go down, there were kids wading around in the courtyard collecting rubbish so it wouldn’t hurt anyone… there were even kids providing light entertainment on the verandah, in the form of Shakira renditions.

When my panic and the water finally started to subside, the kids were already in recovery mode. Our place went from being partially submerged under thick brown water to spick and span in the space of a couple of hours. If the East Timor government wants some poster boys and girls for the nation’s work ethic, I know where to find them.

When you put yourself in situations where you have to depend on the kindness of strangers (or in this case, a crack team of super-capable children you hardly know), it never ceases to amaze me how quickly people come to your aid. Especially when they have so little to give themselves. And if you’re lucky, afterwards you can all eat icecream together.

1850 hours: cooking underway

1915 hours: dinner on track

1928 hours: dinner not so on track anymore

1929 hours: courtyard disappears

1936 hours: it's a photo opportunity, why panic?

2038 hours: water subsides, Timor SAS gets to work

2125 hours: the troops need icecream!

2145 hours: spick and span

Just a typical Sunday night

On the weekend my housemate and I experienced Timorese hospitality, right in our own home. A few of the local kids came in to say hello and somehow ended up staying for a couple of hours and cooking dinner for everyone. This routine (as it seems to be one now) was repeated the following night as well.

Could this be the secret purpose of the midget bench?

I have never seen such an industrious group of kids –within a few minutes they had cleaned up our dirty dishes from lunch, put some corn on the stove to pop and started cleaning the rice for cooking.

Their inventiveness with our food was truly impressive (especially from my perspective, as I’ve been living on ramen noodles the last few days because my digestive system finally gave up its stoic fight against Dili’s bacteria). It was a whirlwind of activity which ended in an interesting, if carbohydrate-rich, dinner, followed by milo mixed with sweetened condensed milk (even in my poorly state I couldn’t quite resist it – maybe the Lindt café should add it to their menu).

Something tells me this could be a new weekly routine – provided our cupboards continue to be well stocked. There was even a not-so-subtle suggestion that we should look into purchasing some apples and icecream for next time. For a cooked meal, friendly company and some free practise at Tetun, I guess it’s not a bad deal.

Ingredients for a night in at Casa Del Random:

7 kids

2 malae (foreigners)

1 open door

3 cups corn

1 packet of frozen potatoes

3 cups rice

3 eggs

1/3 block cheese

1 eggplant

1 lemon

2 limes

2 onions

1 cucumber

3 tomatoes

2 limes

4 icy poles

2 handfuls of shrimp chips

10 Milk Arrowroot biscuits

1 can sweetened condensed milk

2/3 tin Milo 

My portrait, as drawn by our youngest guest

Rainbow paddlepops and pink lemonade

It’s been a long time since I could really honestly identify myself as one of those people who get carsick. I did give it a good crack for a few years though – the words ‘rainbow paddlepop’ and ‘pink lemonade’ have a special meaning for my sister, who unfortunately for her, was sitting next to me on virtually all of my childhood chuck-ups.

So given my history, when I started to feel sick last Thursday morning on the way to Viqueque, I was also having some pretty graphic flashbacks from my days as a hopelessly nauseous child. To put my primal fear into context, we had just started out on a 9 hour round trip from Dili to Viqueque and back (see crazy map below) a trip that was to be completed in 1 impossible, deep vein thrombosis-inducing day. We were five in the 4WD – me, the driver, the CEO and two of the Education Department guys. The thought of vomiting my way to Viqueque (the joys of alliteration aside) was not particularly appealing.

The X marks the spot en route to Viqueque where I started feeling sick

After suffering in silence for a while, a foggy spectre of a thought occurred to me – I am not a morning person! Because if there’s one thing I know as fundamentally as I know I used to be a chronic car vomiter, it’s that I am not a morning person. Even in Sydney, I tended to avoid sustained conversations at work before 10am. And here I was, trapped in a car on winding road, teetering on the edge of a cliff, at 5:15am! (I also think that the elevator music being played by the driver - instrumental Love Is In The Air, etc. in electro beats - ad nauseum was actually making me feel, well, ad nauseous).

I would like to think it was the power of positive thought that got me through the day without being sick, but I think it was the fact I ended up sleeping a lot, and when I wasn’t doing that, willing my ipod batteries to last all the way back to Dili so I wouldn’t be driven insane by the elevator music (the Indonesian Christmas carols we got into on the way back were only marginally better).

The purpose of the trip itself – an inauguration ceremony for a new school building – was just the mix of heartwarming and downright bizarre that I’m becoming accustomed to in East Timor. In this case, they had made a cake in the shape of the new classroom (they had got the pastel green of the paint spot on) and there I was wearing a tais (traditional cloth) around my neck, clinking glasses of Cinzano with about 15 old men – is there a better way to celebrate a new classroom?!

One camera, 15 minutes, 74 photos later

Some people find public speaking intimidating. Or jumping out of planes. I’m not sure where being stared at by 30 Timorese kids fits on the scale, but when you try to break the ice with some awkward Tetun (the local language), which doesn’t get a response apart from a cascade of giggles, you start to feel pretty intimidated.

I was in a village perched on the side of a hill for some community consultations – basically five days of talking to children and their parents in an effort to discover what problems and issues they are facing (just quietly, someone needs to speak to the local teacher about hitting the kids on the head). To get to the village, we had to drive about an hour from the nearest town, then descend down a deep escarpment into a dry river bed (maybe a kilometre wide and half as deep), then up again on the other side, until we finally crested the hill and saw the village soccer field – with goals made out of branches and a bevy of goats keeping the grass down. It wasn’t long till I found myself sitting in front of the community feeling pretty, well, visible.

The soccer field

The riverbed (being traversed by Timor's Cadel Evans)

Maybe this is what Barack Obama or Princess Mary feel like when they’re on an official gadabout – there’s nothing you can do that won’t be seen. There’s no subtle wedgie picking when you’re being watched by the entire community. There’s no subtle choking on the incredibly spicy sauce they serve with the cassava. So when I noticed my pants (found secondhand in the Dili markets) had a hole in the crotch, I started to feel pretty exposed.

While I’m not the biggest fan of technology, when I remembered I had my camera in my bag I couldn’t get it out fast enough – don’t look at the white person, kids, look at the shiny camera! I think it should be a truth universally acknowledged that any child shall be endlessly amused by looking at their likeness produced, again and again, by a digital camera.

The results of my social experiment are below – some were taken by me, some by the kids. And if anyone did notice the hole in my pants, they were much too polite to say.

Home Sweet Home

Finally, I’ve escaped the clutches of Timorese hotels and have found myself a home!

It comes complete with:

Genuine moat entrance (even more moat-like after the afternoon rains)

Pig family

Chicken family

 

Dogs who will be my friends (but don’t know it yet)

Thorny pot plants for extra security

 

Midget kitchen bench

 

Thought-provoking graffiti

Jesus/Mary shrine (complete with candles and bottled water)

 

English football-themed bed

 

Various pets – including but not limited to hermit crabs, ants and geckos

In short, I have everything I need in a home. We also have lots of nice families nearby who normally refrain from laughing if we fall in the moat, and feel quite comfortable coming inside to rearrange our cupboards after we return from the supermarket (apparently there is a wrong spot to put your pasta).

If you’re not convinced this is prime real estate, we live about 150m from the best dumplings in Dili. Which if you know me, means that everything is just fine.