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