After one week in Dili

23 August-30 August 2013

An early start of 03:45 on the 23 August saw me onto a plane from Darwin Airport to Dili and was an uneventful flight although the plane’s ascent and descent seemed to be one of the steepest I have experienced. I witnessed a traffic accident on the way from the hotel where a car tried running over woman on a motorbike.  My taxi driver took it upon himself to assist the lady and the traffic started again.  Lesson 1: It is the driver from behind's responsibility to not run up the rear of another car/motorbike, but still get out of the way ASAP as they sometimes do not follow their own rules for whatever reason.

We are staying at a hotel as long term accommodation has not been sorted, which is made harder as there are no real estate agents in town.  There is a possible business opportunity here but can we get real estate agents to donate their time to setting one up here?

The In-Country Orientation (ICO) has been intense where on the first day we were inducted by one of the many western consultancies that have set up shop here to support the development of the oil and gas wealth in the Timor Sea.  It was interesting to note that there were not encouraging their staff to interact with the locals while Engineers Without Borders is the opposite – the locals will need to run/build what EWB has facilitated in the long term…  Lesson 2: past development approaches do not effectively work, it would seem that the volunteer that needs to challenge their underlying assumptions not the locals.

One feature of my placement is the provision of a motorbike by my partner organisation, BESIK, for me to get around.  So on Monday we went to the licencing office to sort this bit of paperwork.  We had allocated the whole day to complete this, however the planets aligned themselves and we completed this task in record time of 1 hour 20 mins.  I had to chuckle when I paid for some photocopying, my change was in the local coins and some lollies!  Lesson 3: Sometimes hard currency is of less value than a gift.

We went to beach in front of one of the embassies for fish on stick.  All week we have been driving past fish sellers thinking to myself, should I or shouldn't I eat food that has not been in the fridge.  It was a liberating experience to go "when in Dili, do what the locals do".  The only advice I would impart is to take some tissues so you can wipe your hands afterwards.  It was also good to not just be with just the EWB group, the expat community is relatively small but really friendly.

On the Thursday, we went to the resistance museum and that was a sobering affair.  This was after seeing a documentary of the resistance to the Indonesian occupation on Wednesday night.  The East Timorese have had it tough over the past 500 years or so, firstly with the Portuguese occupation (with little investment in the colony throughout that time), the first vote for autonomy in 1974, Indonesian occupation from 1975 to 1999.  The East Timorese seem to be getting on with their lives although you can see the evidence of the occupation through Dili.  The stop the boats stuff in Australia is just pointless once you have seen how people struggle in another part of the world.

It has been a steep learning curve and so the show must go on....