Wild West

Sans towel. Sans bed sheet. Sans mosquito net. Sans electricity. Sans toilet from 7:30am to 5:30pm.

There was a lot of sans for me last week in Maliana. What I did have however, was an endless supply of crumbly Kraft biscuits and a copy of The Grapes of Wrath. Which got me through, and that’s the important thing.

Maliana is about 4 hours’ drive from Dili, near the border with West Timor, Indonesia. Once you get there, past rocky roads and through numerous landslides, you feel like you’ve reached a frontier town. There’s a dusty main road and the major landmark is ‘the big tree’. There are two restaurants in town, right next to each other (although I think they’re secretly sharing a kitchen). Under the big tree, there’s almost always a group of young men, surrounded by a litter of motorcycles bought cheaply across the border. There’s even a big 4WD full of cronies that cruises past every so often. Occasionally you see an old guy in a battered akubra. I was just waiting for the tumbleweed to roll down the street.

THE tree

I was in Maliana to work on a project where we’re teaching kids to take photos, write stories and make films. We keep them in the classroom for as long as we can, then when we can’t take any more we let them out, cameras in hand. There are no rules about where they can wander, and no one seems to care very much. After all, this is a nation that seems to have an unwritten law that children on motorbikes can’t wear helmets.

The oeuvre of choice for budding young photographers in Maliana at the moment is photos of each other posing in front of trees and flowers with ghetto style hand gestures. This differs only slightly from my neighbours in Dili, who prefer to pose in front of pictures of fish and the Jesus shrine in our loungeroom. Another emerging oeuvre is photos of the reluctant malae – I could fill a photo album with all the shots of sweaty me surrounded by sweaty (enthusiastic) kids.

The paparazzi

Between the poses though, there’s often some nice surprises. One of my favourites was an ultra close up of the inside of a flower – all creamy yellow and powdery pollen. I was complimenting the three boys on their photo, while I scrolled along to a series of photos documenting two of them having a very earnest-looking fight.

‘Halimar deit?’ (‘Just joking?’ I asked).

‘Tebes’ (‘For real’ they said).

The silver lining was that at least they were fighting over the camera. And you have to commend the photographer for his tabloid-style approach to the situation.

By the time I got back to Dili late on Friday night, stomach full of biscuits and brain full of half-remembered Tetun, I was well and truly ready for some good old fashioned English conversation. The only visible signs Maliana left on me were glazed eyes and one mosquito bite on my elbow (my first since I arrived in Timor). Not so wild west maybe, but I do like my amenities.

Local cowboy

Weapon of choice

After almost 25 years on earth, I may have found my sport.

I’ve attempted everything from netball to tennis and darts. Results were mediocre at best. The closest I’ve been to finding my sporting niche was table tennis, with a net strung up on our old dining table. I pursued this sport with fanatical enthusiasm, which admittedly probably had something to do with being in Year 12 at the time.

My new sport suits me in every way – you can play it at any time in the comfort of your own home. The equipment is cheap and you don’t need to motivate yourself at all – the rules of the game do that for you.

My favourite time to play is just before bed, in my pyjamas. With racquet in hand, it’s like my own personal squash court except that instead of the sound of the ball rebounding off the walls, there’s the snap crackle pop of another mosquito biting the dust on my electrified racquet.

Yes, this is a blood sport.

All you need to survive in our house: electric racquet and craft materials.

A good night’s sleep for me at the moment has to be preceded with a good ten minutes of waving the racquet around, then a head count of dead mosquitoes on my bedroom floor.

Apparently there’s a bit of a dengue outbreak going on in Dili at the moment. If you’ve had the opportunity to look at or smell Dili’s drains recently, it’s not much of a surprise. They tend to get so blocked up that the water stops moving completely and sets into a thick bluish sludge. Occasionally some brave, community-minded soul will start pulling the sludge and assorted sludgeriffic items out of the drains in an effort to get things moving. As you can tell, it doesn’t really work.

This was once water.

We received a list of advice yesterday on how to avoid mosquito bites. One of which was to tuck your trousers into your socks. I’ll be sure to pass that on to Steve Urkel. And the next time I combine the unbearable snugness of socks with the heat trapping capacity of long pants (in Dili, these are mutually exclusive events), I’ll remember to do some tucking in.

In the meantime, I’ll be practising my serve every night before bed.

Baby Boomers

The last time I was in a primary school classroom, I was 11 years old.

This time around, I was being interrogated by a class full of 11 year olds – ‘Are you married?’ ‘What’s your religion?’ ‘What’s your father’s name?’

All the important questions.

Compared to my memories of primary school, this was somewhat different. A blackboard propped up on chairs. Curious eyes peeping through windows without glass. No electricity.

Chalk and sweat

Each class (schools here usually have two shifts – one round of classes in the morning, a fresh round of kids in the afternoon) starts with a rousing, if somewhat high pitched, rendition of the Timorese national anthem. Which, like a lot of things here, is a bundle of ironies that somehow the Timorese manage to carry off. The anthem is in Portuguese (‘Patria… oh patria’), which seems like an odd choice for a country throwing off the legacy of 400 years of colonial rule and 25 years of occupation. But despite this, and the almost-beyond-the-range-of-human-hearing high notes that were being relentlessly hit (or missed), I found it surprisingly touching.

These kids were all born between 1999 and 2002 – which is a short time span in ordinary places but in Timor-Leste, these were years that spanned total and utter turmoil, families losing and finding each other, and finally, in 2002, independence and peace. These kids were born in a time of extremes, which I can’t even imagine. They’re as old as the country they live in.

It doesn't matter where you are, 11 year old girls ALWAYS stick together.

Getting accustomed to always being the huge, white elephant in the room.



Zen and the art of weekend excursions

Further up the beach, I could almost see the lattes and muffins laid out in front of expats relaxing on the weekend. I knew they’d be there, because that’s been me – chatting, reading and speaking in my most favourite of all languages, English.

But this Sunday I was at the other end of the beach, dragging four squealing kids through the water – two on each hand. At various other points I was also acting as a human diveboard, leveraging the kids so they could fly briefly through the air before landing in the water. I was also patiently waiting my turn to receive my ration of the rice we’d bought with us, in the taxi, in the huge orange bowl we normally wash dishes in. We’d also bought juice, an omelette, spaghetti, sausages and tempe.

The spread

Oh, and eight children. Did I mention the eight overexcited children?

So far, living in Timor-Leste has been one slow surrender to the kids next door. Not content with Sunday night dinners, we’ve expanded our repertoire to include birthday cakes, videoke, dance-offs and shopping at the local market. It was only a matter of time before we ventured further afield – to the brown sands of Areia Branca/Pasir Putih, a short trip east of Dili (despite the name, white sand, the beach features what can only be described as ordinary, normal-coloured sand).

Excursion mode of transport: taxi

With the words of the scary child protection lady at pre-departure training echoing in my head (“never, ever, let the local kids inside your house”), I decided to just go with the flow because let’s face it, we crossed that line months ago.

This is how we roll

After unpacking the food, eating the food, swimming, posing for 100+ photos, swimming again, swapping sunglasses, eating again, swimming again, eating again… (you get the idea) we dragged some very reluctant kids back to Dili with us.

By the time we made it back to our place (we got a lift with someone’s uncle – now who’s feeling like a ten year old?), I think my eyes were somewhat glazed by the constant barrage of Tetun, games in the water and the frequent head counts (“Where is naked boy? Have you seen naked boy?” when we thought we’d lost our youngest member).

The crystal clear waters of Pasir Putih

Back at home I did get some special treatment from the kids, who must have realized they’d pushed me to my limits – “Joey tenki baa tuur ho deskansa. Hau hamoos. Tenki deskansa” (“Joey, you must go sit and rest. I will clean. You must rest”).

We were left with no food in the fridge, patchy sunburn and a new motto: ‘accept and surrender (or you will go insane)’.

Zen