Pigs wag tails

It’s not their fault, really.

Their appearance on my doorstep every morning coincides with my longest time ever spent without a hairy, wet-nosed significant other in my life.

Their brown eyes and beguiling ways enchant me even as I feel like I’m cheating on the one who really has my heart, back in Sydney.

And no one ever told me that pigs wag their tails.

Not only do they sleep with smiles on their faces and trot along with a spring in their step, they are also cute enough to wag their tails. All the time. Whether the wagging is to keep flies away from the back door (there’s probably a better euphemism for that) or to show affection when a certain enthralled foreigner walks past, I don’t really need to know. Details are clearly not important to someone who thinks a piglet would make a great pet.

I have practically always had a dog in my life. So it's unfortunate that the dogs of Dili are cat-like in their aloofness. Timorese dogs are lean, mean and self-sufficient. They’re used to getting relentlessly downtrodden by people, so they tend to eye me off as if they’re sizing up my propensity to throw a shoe at them.

The local piggies, on the other hand, are more like the dogs we have at home. Often overfed, possibly mollycoddled and secure in the knowledge that (for now at least) they occupy a very comfortable spot in the family sphere.

If you’re unable to see the inherent cuteness of these pigs, you will begin at least to understand how starved of animal affection I have been.

Also, you haven’t seen the tails in motion.

Piggy the pig - Dili

Pidgy the dog - Sydney

Suai bother?

This week I went to Suai for work, and made some additions to my ‘things I love about Timor’ list (subsection: pleasant absurdities). Namely:

A cow named Kevin

You can't see it here but Kevin's name is emblazoned on his flanks.
Notice his smug, self-satisfied air.

Gussied-up appliances

Because everyone knows fans looks better in satin ribbon.

House decorations made out of recycled cans AND plastic

The Toyota Prius of home decorating in Suai.

Flower garden (not absurd, but I do love a good garden)

Thriving in clay in front of a house made of bamboo.

The trip to Suai was a bit of a mixed bag because for every giggle I had, we’d come across something that would sober me up quick smart.

On the way there, we passed a place known as ‘Jakarta 2’. It looks like a fairly innocuous place until you notice how the ground suddenly falls away, a sheer drop of 500m or more, to rocks below. A place of natural fear which Indonesian military exploited for unnatural cruelty. The soldiers told a nearby village to start walking – they were going to Jakarta. When they got to the cliff, every person was forced off it. One man survived. That was October 1986.

Jakarta 2 memorial

Later on the road, we passed a village where many houses had been razed to the ground. All that was left were scorched concrete foundations where homes used to stand. Apparently the local martial arts group (translation: gang) killed a police officer from the next village. The police officer’s village retalitated by burning down the houses. That was August 2011.

In the little hamlet where Kevin the cow lives, we were interviewing a man for what seemed like a straightforward story about him and his three children. About twenty minutes in he casually mentioned that he actually had eight children – the first five had all died, between the ages of 10 and 12, from undiagnosed illnesses. Understandably searching for answers, he turned to a local elder/medicine man who fashioned necklaces for his remaining three children out of wood from a sacred tree. They are all still alive.

The people of Suai have my utmost respect, not just because they’re still rebuilding the local church 12 ½ years after Indonesian militia killed around 200 people there, but because they’re growing flowers and dressing appliances and making craft out of rubbish at the same time. 

Suai Church

'Black September' memorial

January means business

Dili in December is all nativity scenes and plastic Christmas trees in irksome shades of green. But some time in the second week of the new year reality kicks in, and the baby Jesuses and loitering Santa Clauses (there’s almost always a token Santa hanging out at a respectable distance from the nativity, sometimes wielding a spear and/or machete) are dismantled unceremoniously. 

This was our local roundabout Christmas tree, a perfect way to dazzle traffic and spread Christmas cheer

The flashing lights are packed away and sadly, the local boys lose their favourite hangouts. The combination of coloured lights, music and shelter is understandably an alluring magnet for young people who usually just have to  hang out on the street, deprived of the ambience created by soft lighting and ‘bring us some figgy pudding’ in melodious beeping. Clearly what was missing that first Christmas in Bethlehem was some locally made wine and a guitar sing-a-long. Apparently various Bishops get annoyed about the ‘misappropriation’ of nativity scenes every year, but to me it seems like a fairly prosaic way to celebrate Christmas. If they set up similar places in shopping centres in Australia, I’m pretty sure they would soon be filled with bored men and fed up women, wallowing in Christmas cheer.

A local night hotspot

With the departure of the nativity scenes, Dili seems to be getting down to business. The presidential elections are in March, followed by the parliamentary elections a few months later. The current prime minister Xanana held his party conference up the road from us last weekend, and there’s frequent talk at the office, at lunch, everywhere you go, about the elections. About the ‘martial arts groups’ (a very Timorese euphemism for gangs). The F-FDTL. The PNTL. UNMIT. The IJMTAUTAY (I’m Just Making This Acronym Up To Annoy You). Lately there’s been quite a few reports of violence/groping/weirdness in various parts of Dili, some of it targeted at malaes (foreigners). It makes you put your guard up when you’re walking around, which is a shame because the most violence I’ve personally encountered to date is an over-eagerness to pellet you with ‘Botardi’s and ‘Diak ka lae?’s.

Apart from that, my glamorous life continues unabated. On my way home from work last week, I actually had to remove my shoes, roll up my pants and wade through our driveway to get inside. Which would be okay except for the fact that since living here I have discovered what pigs love to do when they’re standing in water (hint: it’s not aqua aerobics).

Wading pool

Our neighbours continue to experiment with landscape gardening and water features. The local Jamie Durie (an old guy missing teeth) recently moved some piles of rocks and dirt around to create the ‘dual reflecting pools’ you see below, which you can imagine has contributed boundlessly to my personal serenity.

The dual reflecting pools

 Ah, Dili. Even as you wind me up you make me laugh.

Positive Polly

There are always plenty of Scrooges and Grinches at Christmas; no shortage of groans from party poopers on New Year’s Eve. But there’s something about the end of one year and the start of another that inspires hope and kindles the urge to make resolutions – to try harder, better, more often. Or maybe just to stop making silly resolutions and start living. 

I am the master of vague resolutions – the type you can’t actually remember by year’s end and there’s no way of measuring your success at them anyway. Vague goal setting, and even vaguer goal scoring, is my game. Lately I admit I have been pursuing that most typical of all self-improvement efforts – being more positive. For about the thousandth time in my life. The latest trigger for this involved a man called Polly and a cafe called Victoria. But that’s another story. 

Unbeknownst to me, my latest effort at effortless positivity was about to coincide with one of the most unrelentingly trying weekends I have ever had. Me and my partner-in-crime (see 12 days of Christmas) decided that the best way to celebrate being away from Sydney for NYE was to, well, get as far away from a typical Sydney NYE as we could. This involved getting to a remote town in the mountains. 

What I hadn’t anticipated was just how stressful the pursuit of mountaintop peace can be. My attempts at relentless positivity are below:


1. Timor’s public buses give you a new appreciation for quaint things like movement, fresh air and time itself. In Timor, the term ‘bus’ has been appropriated to include large vehicles that traipse around the country with a vague aim to get somewhere, sometime in the future. After waiting almost an hour for our bus to leave Dili, we drove around for half an hour, picking up random people chauffeur style, before returning once again to the original bus stop. After a few more delays we were finally on the road out of Dili – only to stop reliably and regularly over 5 hours so passengers (or ‘my companions in purgatory’ as I came to think of them) could do their food shopping, have regular toilet stops, negotiate the price of the bus fare and buy corn from the roadside. 

The 'bus'

2. Walking to the top of a mountain to find you have no accommodation at the beautiful Poussada on top of said mountain may be disappointing, but it’s a great opportunity to have your alternative accommodation, a small house located on the other side of the valley, pointed out to you.

The Poussada has a garden AND dogs

3. Staying across the road from a church blasting Christmas Carols, at a level which makes them indistinguishable from white noise, is a great opportunity to make ‘visions of sugarplums danced in their heads’ into a reality as you try and sleep. 

Church/juke box

4. A love of fireworks may be one of the few universal truths of human beings. Away from Sydney’s million-dollar harbour bonanza and Dili’s relentless firecrackers, I was looking forward to the peaceful silence of village life. However when the Christmas carols stopped, the homemade firework CANNONS started. Yes, that’s right. Firing explosives out of hollow wooden logs never fails to bring people together. 

The prized village cannons

5. Sometimes, you get exactly what you want. It just might not be what you imagined. Me and my partner-in-crime’s rationale was to get ‘as far away as possible’ from a Sydney NYE (which for the uninitiated normally involves overpriced tickets/hours dedicated to reserving 1 square metre of grass, copious amounts of alcohol, overcommitted, unreliable friends and sometimes even a sinking feeling). We got exactly what we asked for – with every warung in the village shut, we ended up eating 2 minute noodles and drinking shandies at 9pm, watching the entire village go to NYE mass across the street. When we went to bed (still in 2011 although I will say I was still awake when the clock ticked over) we were treated to the ‘party bulb’ – a light in our room which, thrillingly, changed colour. Again and again. Maubisse is clearly nothing if not a party town. 

The party bulb

For me, the first morning of the new year was bright, fresh and punctuated by the fantastic outfits the locals were wearing to church (notice a theme emerging?). Bright little girls in taffeta like starry-eyed asterisks, tall men in bellbottoms and cowboy hats like walking exclamation marks. 

I was starting to like Maubisse, although as the time ticked by we were getting more and more anxious about how we were going to get out of there. Having discovered no buses were running that day (it’s a shame how I’m taking my normally shambolic approach to life and not adapting it at all even though I’m now living in a developing country and am sometimes responsible for visitors who have to fly home the next day), we had teed up a lift with a local guy. Our misgivings were horribly realised at midday when we were told, ‘Oh, you’re looking for Mosu? He’s already gone back to Dili.’ 

This is what happens when positivity meets Maubisse

Thankfully our prayers were answered (perhaps a little too OBVIOUSLY, if you ask me), when a Jesuit priest in a pick up truck materialised. He was on his way back to Dili (which he thoughtfully described as “some kind of hell”) and we had a sweet, short (2 hour) ride back to the capital. This was my first time hitchhiking and to go with a priest, still wearing his robes from that morning’s mass, seemed ideal. 

Back in Dili, happy to be home (yes, I have started calling it that), being greeted by cries of ‘Joey! Joey!’ and several snuffling pigs, I couldn’t help feeling pretty darn happy. And relieved. And exhausted. But because I’m being positive, let’s just stick with happy.