Tuesday 5 November 2013

Goats are part of society too



28 October - 3 November 2013

The week started off with another road trip but this time to Hera which is about 30 mins from Dili.  Unlike previous road trips, this one was about seeing how they teach people about good hygiene, I may have used the term WASH, which means Water, Sanitation and Hygiene.  People’s health and wellbeing is greatly improved by just by improving water supplies alone and are improved much further through the construction of toilets and better hygiene largely through good hand washing.  

The sanitation guys were teaching PSF’s (Proper Sanitation Facilitators, I think, they use a lot of acronyms here) how to communicate the importance of good hand washing with the villagers and to build a tippy tap.  A tippy tap is basically a bottle that can be tipped using an improvised foot pedal.  These people were also shown how dirty hands can be by shining a black light on their hand before and after washing their hands with soap.  It is yet something else that we take for granted by home.


This week was also spent reviewing the survey data from last week’s trip in the Bonbonaro District, in particular the village of Purugoa a 30 minute drive from Maliana.  This is how the survey data looks in the Geographic Information System (GIS):

I stumbled upon a small program (GHydraulics) that translates the GIS data into a format ready for the pipe flow analysis tool (EPANET), this tool is used to design all of the rural water supply systems at BESIK.  After making a number of mistakes, not following the manual (sound familiar?) and more fiddling around with the settings, I managed to make my first EPANET model this way:

And imagine my surprise when it brought the topographic map as the background, I then thought can this be brought in Google Earth?  Yes it could through using another QGIS plugin called GEarthView:



The distortion in Google Earth is due to the viewing angle and it re-shaping the aerial photograph to match the ground levels.  Boys and their toys indeed!  It felt good to have finally achieved a milestone (not be confused with a millstone) for my time in TL.
Onto less engineering related matters, Friday was a public holiday (All Saints Day), so I lived it up on Thursday night (Halloween) where I dressed up as a priest of the Pastafarian faith by wearing a colander on my head, carrying a bag of pasta and spoon (this is my inspiration: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14135523).  I am kicking myself that I did not think of this when I was getting my TL licence.  At the party, nearly all of the people had to ask me what it was about, however two knew about Pastafarianism, it is a faith that is slowly growing.

On Saturday, I headed to Tasitolu (Three beaches) to check out the oversized traditional house built for Pope John Paul II’s 1989 visit.  Even the goats make good use of the facilities, there are a lot of goats in TL.


There was even a statue of the Pope up on a hill but the guide book got the directions wrong, it said head east, in fact, I had to head west up a short steep road – the motorbike even struggled up in first, was this some form of Catholic guilt the motorbike was carrying?  The views from the top of the hill were good, my phone camera could not do the water colours justice nor had anybody passed by recently to trim the trees to improve the view. Apparently this stretch of beach is one of the best dive sites close to Dili.  I will have to check that out soon.


The area marked in yellow in the centre picture is a cemetery located on a small hill close to the airport there were hundreds of Timorese paying their respects when I passed by in each direction, given it was All Saint Day (read weekend).  I had taken a photo of the Santa Cruz cemetery earlier which is across the road from my new abode (I have not moved in yet).  The Timorese cemeteries are a little more colourful than the Australian equivalent and are very busy places in the late afternoon most days of the week.  

The cultural experiences just keep coming in TL this weekend, I was invited to a small gathering for Diwali (Festival of Lights) an important day for Indians throughout the world at Bhavani’s place on Sunday.  The company and the food was great.  

After all of that fun, I think I am need of a weekend… I have a strange sense that I may going to the districts although I do not know where.

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