Ordinaire a la Timor

This week has been a pretty ordinary week in Timor. No dead rats or landslides to date – not even a political rally to break up my routine.



Ordinaire at home

Ordinary yes, but of course this is Ordinaire a la Timor:

Coming home on Wednesday night, I was met by 400 people kneeling on my street, praying. There were at least three statues of Mary, a superfluity of nuns on loudspeakers and many little candles clutched in children’s hands. I felt quite conspicuous in my walking shoes, sans candle, and of course there was no way they could know just by looking at me that my confirmation name is Mary Magdalene (come to think of it, that may not have impressed them very much). After sitting on the street for a while, the procession eventually moved on and I walked, as reverently as possible, home.

 

Earlier in the week I did a training session for about 40 staff from the districts. It was going well for about, oooh 2 minutes, until a guy in the front row decided this was a perfect opportunity to get an up-close photo of a malae (foreigner). Which then gave another guy the same idea. Today I’m actually doing photography training, so I can’t wait to see what happens then.

The most heart warming development of this week is that I found some dogs who actually like people! This is a huge breakthrough, because whenever I attempt to get close enough to a dog for a surreptitious pat, they tend to bolt in the other direction. I think when they look at a person, what they’re really seeing is a foot coming in their direction, so I can’t really blame them. But these were puppies who are too young to be scared of people yet, so I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon at work patting them, talking to them and scooping water out of a little pond for them. Capacity schmacity building. Everyone knows what I'm really here for is to pass on Western notions of pet care.

Hanging with the security guard, Cafe (brown puppy), Boy (black puppy) and as-yet-unnamed-puppy

Panic room

There are a number of key experiences you apparently need to have before you can say you’ve really lived in Timor. It makes for a daunting bucket list. I’ve already ticked off getting trapped in a slow-moving microlet for 5 hours, embarrassing myself with bad Tetun, getting groped on the street (double tick for that one), getting delayed by a landslide… you know, the usual.

This week I ticked off a big one. And it was one I was hoping to skip altogether. It’s the rat experience.

My life, up to last week, has been blissfully rodent-free. Apart from the odd possum in the roof, my most significant encounter with a rodent was my slavish devotion to Disney (and Mickey Mouse) for most of my childhood. What can I say? I’ve been living a pretty sweet life.

All of that changed this week, when I was unknowingly trapped in a small room with a rat the size of a small cat for 5 hours.

I knew we had a rodent guest living in the roof. I’d been plotting its death at a leisurely pace – I’d even got instructions on how to make a homemade trap using an empty wine bottle and copious amounts of butter. Use your imagine for that one.

Things went from leisurely to all out freakish on Monday night when I went to bed with an inexplicably uneasy feeling only to be terrorised by strange sounds. At one point I was woken up by something running across the mattress just above my head. I knew I had a guest, but I thought it was a mouse. I don’t know why I thought it was a mouse. I now realise that was completely stupid. I was clearly in denial.

At about 5am when I’d tired of leaping up, crazed, clutching my torch and searching my room every 45 minutes, I moved into the lounge room to sleep. I was exhausted. Paranoia is tiring, people. I eventually drifted into an uneasy sleep. And what was I woken by? Not by the chiming of church bells or the smell of roasting coffee…

I was woken by a huge rat pawing at my lap. Presumably it had missed my company in the bedroom and wanted to snuggle. I don’t know. It was clear I had an insane, emotionally needy rodent on my hands.



Look at its beady red eyes, pining for affection.

I won’t describe the next hour or so but I will say I fought back the urge to cry and instead focused on getting the rat away from me and out to the kitchen, where it could cuddle up to any old inanimate object it felt like.

Eventually I got to work, jumpy and bleary eyed. My colleagues cheered me up with strong black coffee and buying not one, but five, packets of rat poison for me. They also validated my experience by reviewing the photographic evidence and agreeing that my nemesis was indeed a ‘laho bo’ot’ (big rat).

Everyone knows the best rat poison has holographic illustrations.

After setting out a generous serving of rat poison, and sleeping with a torch beside me for the last 2 nights, I came home yesterday to the sweet smell of rodent death. After a quick hunt, we found it. Needless to say, it was a happy moment.

Now, I look both ways before entering the kitchen and I keep thinking I can see a rat out of the corner of my eye. I hope one day to make a full recovery.

Just another Timor happy snap

The three levels of piglet

So this was going to be a charming witty little blog about contrasts. You see, I spent last week in Australia. Now I’m back in Dili. It was going to be all ‘look at this coffee here’, ‘look at the footpath there’. But I’m currently writing this in sweaty darkness*, Dili’s electricity grid having given up after some wind this afternoon. Normally the barometer here ranges between ‘absolutely still’ and ‘sickly puff of hot air,’ so a real breeze is enough to bowl everyone over (sorry couldn’t help it).

The election campaign got into full swing in my absence. Without polls, I’m judging public sentiment in a totally scientific way: flags and t-shirts. If Dili’s streets on Wednesday were anything to go by, Fretilin is the front runner, but on Tuesday about 20 trucks full of Lasama supporters swamped us on our way back from Liquiça. Either way, Dili’s screen printers have won.

Overcrowded rally truck #46 (they have not received their T-shirts yet)

What is of much more import to me at the moment are changes in my neighbourhood. For example, there are new pigs on the block (not the chopping block – not yet, anyway). I now have medium sized piglets, little piglets, and tiny piglets to ooh and ahh over. With each reduction in piglet size, my voice gets higher. Which means I’ve added to my ‘crazy malae’ credentials amongst my neighbours – as well as carrying a rainbow umbrella in all weather, I talk to pigs. In a high-pitched voice. Great.

Medium piglets - you've met these guys before

Little piglet, or hyena hybrid

Tiny piglets! (in a high pitched squeal)

The polls open tomorrow and the preliminary results will be announced on Sunday. So I’m looking at a self-imposed writing retreat this weekend. I have done a couple of writing retreats in the past which featured copious amounts of food (and alcohol), wombats and rolling down hills in tandem with playwrights (actually I think there was a line of about seven of us, head to toe). The fruits of the last writing retreat included the infamous ‘Minties Project’. This time round, there’ll be no catering, wombats or other crazy playwrights. There’ll just be me, (hopefully) electricity and homemade sangria.

*no I’m not. I was. I have attempted to write this blog about four times. I think I’ve been suffering from post-Australia exhaustion (when you’re having a first world problem in a developing country, it’s even more shameful).

March on

Yesterday was the first official day of the presidential election campaign. Which means that overnight, every spare post, tree and lamp in Dili has been reclaimed as an opportunity to hang yet another poster of a sparkly-eyed, Jesus T-shirt-wearing presidential candidate. Party flags abound, one Molotov cocktail has already been thrown and the local papers are featuring exciting news stories such as ‘ballot paper printing reaches 50%’. It’s on.

The cast of characters campaigning for presidency are too numerous for me to have any hope of knowing who’s who – I’m pretty sure there’s more than ten. Of course there’s the old bastion of international diplomacy, José Ramos-Horta, who has a penchant for riding round Dili in a golf buggy and tweeting things like “Two events in Los Angeles today, private lunch and cocktail party”.

Then there’s Taur Matan Ruak (whose name means ‘two sharp eyes’ in Tetun), an ex-military commander who says things like “Today I am only letting out bullet by bullet. What comes next is a cannon.”

There’s also Angela Freitas, former lover of a former coup leader who was actually thrown out of the campaign for not ticking some box or other. Her PR campaign has not wavered – every other day there’s a story of how she’s been targeted or her office has been ransacked, and ‘Viva Angela Freitas’ is apparently the top graffiti tag in town. 

As a humble outsider, all of this is totally confusing. Especially because everyone keeps telling me that the President of Timor-Leste is just a ceremonial position. If that is true (I have my doubts) these people must really be hankering after the keys to that golf buggy.

March 17 is the date in the diary, although the electoral system here means that there’ll probably be a second round a few weeks later, before the parliamentary elections in June. Which are apparently even more bamboozling and potentially volatile.

Death, taxes and leadership spills… it’s the same everywhere right?

This is much nicer to look at than a presidential candidate on an oversized poster.