Timor Leste 365: Development Boy and Capacity Girl!

19-6-12

Di’ak ka lae?

That is “How are you?” in Tetun. Hopefully you are as well as Nemo and I. We are having our ups and downs, today is defiantly an up, after 6 days, 2 food markets, 3 supermarkets and countless corner stores we finally found ice cream!!!!

It was a very tasty reward for 2 days of hard work at language classes. The first day was ……overwhelming, we got hit with half a dictionary of vocabulary and it hurt my brain trying to remember even a fraction of it. But today was a little better. We know a few greetings, how to order food, name various body parts and finally my name means something in another language!!! I have always been secretly jealous of people like my brother Jack, whose name can be used in everyday language, must be an attention seeking thing I guess. You can jack up a car, get car jacked, there are four jacks in a deck of cards, you can be a jack of all trades and you can even jack off if you are so inclined. In Tetun ‘ben’ means juice, and ‘susuben’ means milk. Apparently in a few languages ‘susu’ means breast or boob, so susuben translates literally to breast-juice…or milk!

It hasn’t been all hard work though, mostly, but between the frustration and confusion of trying to learn another language there has been a few slices of humour. For example Naomi and I have had to pretend we are married for the sake of cultural norms and Nemo was asking our teacher how to say “Will you marry me?” to the teacher, so that she could ask me as a bit of a joke. But she had forgotten or didn’t pick up on the fact that when said in that way the words marry and sex are the same. So you can understand why our teacher looked more than a little confronted and embarrassed when in front of the whole class Naomi asked him if he wanted to have sex with her, embarrassing for her and him, hilarious for the rest of us.

Either today or yesterday we have both been to our individual NGOs Dili offices. Not for a days hard work, but mainly just for a meeting with the staff and to get a better understanding of what they do in Timor and how they go about it. Both of us found it really good to finally get a look at what we will be doing and what level of resources they might have to work with. Obviously these were the Dili offices and are in all likely hood much better equipped than the offices in Same, but it was a good start. It was a strange feeling leaving the hotel and then walking into the office for the first time. Not knowing anyone (we have actually both met our bosses once before at a dinner last week, and they are amazing, but both of us got to work before our boss did), not speaking the language and not having been there before, it felt like being a kid rocking up to a new school in a foreign country, a little nerve racking to say the least. To commemorate the first day at the new job Nemo decided we should take photos of us in our work get ups, full of nerves and excitement. She called us, Development Boy and Capacity (building) Girl!

That’s enough of the work stuff, you all probably want to hear about the cool stuff we have been doing! We bought ourselves some wheels!

Seems like the best way to get around, well the most cost efficient anyway. We got a pretty good deal, we got the bikes, helmets, front & back lights, bells, locks, puncture repair kit, bike pump for $300 each. Which is a pretty sweet deal, considering they have shockies, do sweet jumps and awesome bells shaped like a soccer ball with a foot to kick it!

We have already got a pretty good amount of use out of them. On Sunday we rode them out to Christo Rei, where the Jesus statue is, guarding the coast. Apparently the statue itself was a gift from the Indonesians in 1996 and stands at over 27m tall! It is MASSIVE. The cape that it sits on was about a 25 minute ride from where we are staying in the centre of Dili, that said Nemo doesn’t like to ride as fast as she can, she much prefers the ride really really really slowly and take in all the sights. But it was a pretty good ride.

Here is Jesus on top of the hill

A close up of the big JC

And a pic of a frog playing a saxophone in front of a cactus with Jesus in the background

We were actually trying to find a shortcut over the hill (as opposed to the 2 hours it takes to ride a pushbike around it) to get to ‘backbeach’, the beach behind the statue. Apparently it is quiet, has white sand and pretty decent snorkeling. We didn’t find the shortcut but did take the opportunity to climb the 1 million steps (might not be a million but surely had to be well over 9 hundred thousand) to get to the base of the statue. Did I mention how steep the steps were or how slowly Nemo likes to walk/ride/climb as she takes in the sights? Steep and slow respectively! We both struggled up them a little, lost a fair bit of fitness drinking and eating our way across Canberra and Dili over the last month. It was well worth the climb though, apart from a few shady looking characters at the top, who for just a second might ask to borrow and not give back our camera. The view was stunning. Here are a few pics

Half way up the climb

Finally at the top!

Dili is around to the right, and back beach on the left

We were so knackered we decided that we needed a beer, half way back to our hotel is the beach bar that we sat and had a few beverages at sunset the night before, so we headed back there. The beach was completely different, when we were there at night time it was low tide and during the day on Sunday it was high tide, the difference is about 50 meters, it looks like a completely different beach. The water comes right up to the base of trees. I wasn’t smart enough to get a photo of the trees overhanging the water but you can see from the shade on my feet that the tree is hanging right over my head while Nemo goes for a very shallow wade in the water.

A few more pics from our ride to Christo Rei

All in all Naomi and I are having a great time. Right not we are sharing a Bintang Bot (500ml stubbie) waiting for a few friends to go out to dinner. I had never had a Bintang before, it’s much better than I thought it would be, certainly suits the climate, but you just can’t go past Aussie beers at the price that a few of the local bars are selling them for.