A day in the life of ...

 Howdy

We had a quiet weekend after a fairly hectic week at work, well for me anyway, so I thought I would update you on what our first full week of work in Same looked like. Just because a lot of people have been asking what it is that we will be doing at work while we are here, so here is a day in the life of us, its actually more a week in the life, but thats not how the saying goes.

To start off with I think they gave me and Nemo the wrong jobs. She does next to nothing all day and I am working my ass off!!! Neither of us are happy about it and if the situation was reversed we would bother be much happier.  Naomi is a dedicated hard working individual and the best thing I’ve ever been good at is making not much look hard, sitting around and generally being lazy! I am of course kidding, not about the workload though, seriously I am doing like 10 times more work than Naomi, I was kidding about neither of us liking it, I am actually enjoying the challenge and Nemo can see the light at the end of the tunnel, it won’t be long before she is swamped with work.

In Naomi’s office there are 3 or 4 people, one of them, Maun Paul, speaks really good English, but due to the violence in Dili he has been trapped there for a few weeks. So in Naomi’s first week of work in Same she has been in her office with three other people, 2 of which don’t speak English at all and the third speaks about as much English as we speak Tetun. So it’s been pretty difficult for her, you can’t do a whole lot of work when you can’t communicate with your fellow colleagues. So while she has been doing as much work as she can to help out, obviously it is far less than she would like and there has also been a few Google, journal and skyping sessions (shouldn’t you have been working as well Miss HH? ;-) ). Although it should all start to pick up this week, for starters Maun Paul gets back, so she will have someone able to translate for her what she can do to help and she has a busy couple of days with field trips. This morning she left at 6:30 for a trip out to a district health centre and I think Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday nights she is actually going out with a team from her Dili office into the field to see a few more. She will be staying overnight with them in whatever accommodation they find, so that should be interesting!

This part of the blog doesn't have many pics, so I'll throw a few random ones in to keep you interested. I call this one 'Happy little kid with pigs in the background on the school oval'

 

Me on the other hand, I’ve been working my butt off. My NGO has been receiving funding over the past 2 years from TCF (Timor Children’s Fund) to put into Education/Health and DRR (Disaster Risk Reduction) which are three of our main focuses alongside Child Protection and Children’s Rights Governance. This funding has come to an end, so it was time for the big evaluation. So my first week in Dili I spent the week reading up on TCF, their relationship with my NGO and what were the goals and expected outcomes of the project. Then I worked with a team originally but ended up being assigned the task to do myself, to write up a series of questions that the evaluation team could use to conduct focus groups with parents/teachers/students/community members and interview government officials to ascertain the level of success in the project. This in itself became more interesting once I was told that I was going to be able to tag-along with the evaluation team on my first week in Same, as the evaluation was in Manufahi and Ainaro (Same is the capital of the Manufahi district and Ainaro is the neighbouring district, on the other side of the big ass mountain).

This pic is called 'Hey bro, why is that big white dude taking pictures of us? I dunno, but I'm not happy about it"

 

Anyway, long story short, Nemo and I came out to Same on the Saturday; the evaluation team were due to fly in on the Monday morning. Their flight was cancelled due to the violence in Dili, they were then supposed to come on the Monday arvo flight, which was cancelled due to rain, then the Tuesday morning flight, cancelled due to fog in Same, Tue arvo, cancelled due to, still not sure, probably pilot laziness, they eventually got here on Wednesday morning. Unfortunately this didn’t mean we could postpone the process until they got here, these evaluations run on tight deadlines, the show must go on.

On Monday I met the District Administrator for Manufahi, I like to think of him as the King of the District, every district has one of these guys and nothing really is allowed to happen in their district without their go ahead. That was good, the meeting was in Tetun but I felt fairly important being part of the (now smaller) team that was interviewing him. After that we went to, hang on I should give you some info on what this project actually involves….

Basically my NGO has been working in conjunction with a whole bunch of community members and government officials and a few other NGOs to improve pre-primary facilities in Manufahi and Ainaro districts. When the Indonesians left Timor they burnt everything to the ground, I think more than 80% of the schools were completely destroyed. So what this project was doing was identifying some of the worst areas and either constructing, reconstructing or refurbishing buildings so that the community has a pre-primary school. Basically they have been building pre-primary schools, training teachers and volunteer staff to work in them.

Ok, so after the District Administrators office we went to one of the schools that was reconstructed. The first thing you see is the colours, bright green and purple! Apparently all of the Pre-Primary’s in this project were this colour so that everyone knows who built them and what they are. Anyway, once in the room I was shown to a fancy seat at the front of the class with all the students and teachers of the school waiting for us to start. My counterpart did a few little activities with the students as part of the evaluation to see if they like the changes around the school which was fun to watch, but I didn’t have too much idea as to what was going on as it was all in a different language.

Normal school building (Primary, actually one of the better ones around)

New pre-primary building

Comparison!

Then it was my turn, this took me off guard as I thought I was just tagging along to the evaluation. But apparently because the team wasn’t in Same yet, facilitating the focus groups that interviewed the teachers/parents and PTA was now my job, just no one had thought to tell me. I knew the questions, I wrote them, so why was I so nervous all of a sudden? O that’s right, because I none of them speak English! So there I was facilitating a focus group with the four teachers, the principal, the head of the PTA and 15-20 other PTA members and parents of the students. Everything I say is being translated by Lala (my amazing counterpart) and every answer they give is being translated back to me, again by Lala.

Inside one of the new school classrooms (the one we were at for the ceremony)

After that we went to another school, this time a brand new building. This school was run by the local church, so they didn’t have a PTA, instead I did the focus group with the nuns and teachers. After that we went to the Minister of Education’s office in Same. Again I interviewed him and two of his most senior school inspectors about the project, again all of my questions and their answers being translated. I got some really good feedback out of them but the process just takes forever. So I managed to interview three government officials, four teachers, a principal, 2 nuns and an entire PTA on my first day, none of whom spoke any English, not too bad. 

I call this one 'Kids playing volleyball on their lunch break'. Notice in this pic the kid on the right with the round bit of concrete tied to a piece of wire.......more on that later.

Tuesday was fairly similar; again the team didn’t get out here, so we had to go on without them. We went down towards the beach on the south side to a town called Betano. Same process as before, Lala facilitated the students and I did the PTA/teachers/parents and community members. I was much less nervous that day as for starters I knew I was doing it more than 2 minutes in advance and I roughly knew what to expect. That particular group was really good; we had lunch and headed back to the office to continue writing the feedback up for the Dili office.

Finally on Wednesday morning the evaluation team got here and we were able to get on with it. Planned for Wednesday was a trip out to Ainaro and a few of its subdistricts. Originally we were planning to stay the night in Ainaro as it is 2-4 hours away depending on the route you take, but we left early and came back at about 6:30 so we could avoid the sleep over. We managed to get to 2 more schools during the day, both of which I did the community/PTA/teachers and parents group again because they had decided that I had done such a great job without them that I should keep doing it. We also managed to interview the Minister of Education in Ainaro, luckily this time we did that interview as a team and I didn’t have all the responsibility. He was a really funny guy actually and spoke a little bit of English (he also had the biggest Mac desktop I’ve ever seen, which must be worth more than all the other equipment in his office put together….)

Old pre-primary building in Lao-Lima

New pre-primary building in Lao-Lima (still not 100% complete yet)

Kids playing at the school (this country goes mental for soccer, its crazy!)

Thursday was spent writing up the feedback from the focus groups and organising the handover for Friday. With it being the end of a 2 year funding project they wanted to do a final big handover, from our NGO to the government and the schools. We chose one of the newly finished schools to host it and invited all of the key people involved over the course of the project. The local education minister, the national education minster, local health minister, local principals, most of the Dili office from my NGO and various other people.

Cassa Primary School. The primary is on the right, the decrepit building straight in front was the old pre-primary, burnt to the ground over a decade ago, it had no roof and was completely gutted. They hadn't had a pre-primary in that town until we built the new one 

The new pre-primary building at Cassa, play equipment is just off to the left

The kids were pretty happy with the play equipment. Although it is meant for the pre-primary kids, I only see big kids on it.....

That's a second thing that kids go crazy for in Timor, cameras, soccer and cameras! These kids were literally climbing over each other to get in the picture, shouting 'Mister Mister! Hey Mister, picture!!'

On the Friday morning we had a small meet and greet over coffee and biscuits with the various ministers that had to fly from Dili to get here before heading to the school for the ceremony.  The ceremony consisted of a lot of speeches, most people gave two if not three speeches, the kids doing a few songs and some activities to show the crowd what kids in Pre-Primary are capable of and finished with some cake, champagne and cutting the ribbon before we had lunch. 

The kids getting ready for a long day of speeches, they were pretty good though, it would have gone for a few hours and they were really well behaved. I struggle to get kids back home to sit still for a 30 min assembly, so props to the Timor kids!

Speeches

The teacher doing a few activities with the students in front of the group

 

And finally the cutting of the ribbon out front of the new playground, which instead of the amazingly coloured walls or the new tables/chairs and equipment and up-skilled teachers, when we did a focus group with them, it was unanimously their favourite addition to their school.

Check out the mountains in the background of this pic. That day was actually the first day we had seen the peaks of that mountain, its usually really cloudy up there. Looks unreal!

The cake cutting was one of the funniest things I have ever seen. It’s a shame too, because I had just put away the camera and I missed the moment. As you can see from the picture there is a table with the champers and cake on it, the kids are all in the front row crowded around the desk and all the officials are crowding the other side trying to get their hand on the knife as it goes through the cake for the picture that will end up in the newspaper. Anyway one of the officials, I can’t remember which one it was, decided that he would pop the champers. He unscrewed the metal bit, but didn’t take it all the way off, just half way, at this point I was wondering what he was doing. Then he proceeded to shake the bottle to 7 hells before popping the cork (which was safely caught in the half unscrewed metal bit) and spraying the cake and the front two or three rows of pre-primary students in champagne!!!! I could not believe it! Myself and the other two or three foreigners in the room were trying not to piss ourselves laughing! All the locals had a good laugh, including the kids that were drenched in sticky champagne. Someone forgot to tell him that we opened a new school and that he didn’t just win the F1.

The cake

The guy whos head is in the middle of the pic was the champagne fiend. So everyone in front and to the left and right of him got drenched. Luckily I was behind him :-)

We had another meeting type thing in the afternoon with some presentations from other key people from the project showing the National Minister of Education how successful it had been and then we finished up for the afternoon with more coffee and biscuits. All in all it was a fairly busy week.

In things non work related. We went for a walk on Saturday and found the house that we will be staying in, the Canadian lodge! It’s not too far away, maybe a 20 minute walk, up a hill though. Luckily we have push bikes, might buy a motorbike, not sure yet. I got my motorbike licence as well btw, did that last month, that was a funny story, remind me to tell you about it when we are back in Aus next.  Here is a pic of the house from the front. Until then, we have found a place in which we will probably stay for the next 4 or 5 weeks until we can move in, this is the 9^th place we have stayed in since leaving home…… all we want is to stop living out of suitcases! At least we are here for a month, so even though the room is small at least we could move our things into the cupboard.

We didn’t hang around and take pics too long at the Canadian lodge, someone is still living there and it could have been really creepy to be sneaking around the property taking pics and the like. There was however a reindeer in the front yard!!! Well the next door neighbours front year, but there isn't a fence, so I'm claiming it.

I also ate dog today for lunch, 1/3 things done, just drink palm wine and watch/bet on a cock fight to go!

Take care

Ben and Naomi

Wait; I forgot about the kid with the circle of concrete. Well actually I don't think it was ever the same kid twice. In this country kids like to do one of two things. Play soccer or push a tire around the street with a stick. But in the town of Cassa, there was a round hollow peice of concrete with some wire attached to it and the kids loved to run around dragging it behind them. Seriously it would have to have been the towns favourite toy, the kids were fighting over it. I think the idea was to run sa fast as you can and keep it rollign behind you until it got speed wabbles and fell over. Baffles me, but they seemed to be having fun.

 

Same Same!

So, I have been asked by Ben to make some input to our blog. The task is daunting as I am not quite as 

articulate as Ben but I’ll give it a go. So… since Atauro whats been happening for us? Well we have had a

 few weeks at work head offices in Dili. I have had a few attacks of nausea and vomiting (Naomi 4 vs Ben 0). 

No, not pregnant, and yes I’m sure. Been frequenting the local cinemas most Thursdays - watched a really 

nice film called Barefoot Dreams which gives a positive insight to life in East Timor for anyone who is 

interested…. Continuing on with our Indian Takeaway and red wine nights, beers on the beach at the fish market

and spending entire Sundays on the beach reading our books…  sadly these luxuries were a 

part of our old life in Dili….

A few beers on the beach at sunset

 

It took us a while to make the move out to Same because of security precautions with the 

parliamentary elections taking place. But the day after the travel restrictions were lifted we 

headed out to Same. The day after that there was security problems in Dili and a few of the 

district areas… Supporters of the party which was not elected were throwing stones at cars 

and causing trouble. There were more than 50 cars set on fire, a few gun shots fired into the air, 

roads closed by the police and one student died. He was hit by a rock accidently. It is apparently 

calm again in Dili today but with potential for more events to occur during the week. So we are 

pretty glad to be in Same where its peaceful but we are still being cautious by not walking around 

at night and getting reports from local staff about any potential threats- so far all good in Same.

 
I was pretty anxious about the drive to Same as we have heard that the roads are shocking. Fortunately 

I was pleasantly surprised. I mean the driving is slow (81km= 5 hours) as its soo mountainous and the 

roads are continuously winding around, over and between mountains but I had imagined that the road

 would be falling off the cliff a lot more than it  actually was. Worst bit is the blind corners, the driver

 honks his horn to alert any potential oncoming traffic such as a truck or full to the brim bus.... So 

despite occasionally fearing for your life the drive was beautiful, and it was really nice and cold up

 in the mountains too! It was a pleasant change from the humidity in Dili.  Being such a Catholic 

nation a lot of the big hills or mountains have a cross located at the peak which makes for interesting 

scenery. The drive from Maubisse to Same was beautiful with rice farms, waterfalls, coffee plantations 

and kids playing on the side of the road (to which our driver yelled “Baa eskola!!”  (Go to school!)) Not 

to mention the seemingly endless number of pigs, cows, goats, chickens, goats, cats, dogs and horses! 

We nearly took a pig out on the drive- never realised how fast they can run when they want to! 

 The markets in Maubisse

 The Church claiming the hill as theirs

 Ben and two of the guys from his work having a smoko on the way out to Same

 Mount Kabalaki, which we have yet to see the top of

 

My work put us up in a room attached to the office over our first weekend here. On our first day here 

we walked into town to check out our new home for the next year. It’s beautiful! We are surrounded by
mountains which we havn’t yet seen the top of as it has been a bit foggy since we got here and the peaks 

are up in the clouds. People are really friendly! Everyone we walk past says hello, some more shy than 

others… A couple people knew a bit of English so were keen to chat with us which was nice- as on arriving

 here we realised how much we need to know Tetun and how much we don’t know yet. Well we are 

managing but it’s continuous confusions as we only know half the words required to make the desired 

sentence and are no doubt saying it all in the wrong order.  Like when we ask “folin hira” (whats the price?) 

and then they reply in Tetun or Bahasa Indonesian and we spend about 2 minutes trying to work out 

how much that is… Ben and I had a laugh today, talking about how we have come into our new offices 

to work with people and lend our skills… they must be thinking “really?? These people??” as we walk 

around smiling like knobs saying thank you and hello a million times asking simple repetitive questions 

and doing strange malae things... but they don’t seem to mind.
 

We have found decent food eateries in Same. I have started eating chicken again as of today. This is 

partially related to my new found dislike of the chicken race- specifically roosters. There are 5 roosters 

next door and they are crowing away all day long- but at about 4am they really get started- non-stop 

and loud! I always thought it is like a 1 time cock-a-doodle-doo as the sun rises at 6.00am. Nope. It’s 

unrelenting. Less chickens in this village the better!

A few of the of stranger animals we share our neighborhood with

 

While on the subject of things that I thought were that are not, I thought it was dry season here, 

well apparently it is but it has poured down with rain all day today and hasn’t stopped.

Ben here now, Naomi got bored, so ill finish. I think she has covered most of it, that’s basically our first 

couple of days here.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised with the markets out here. We found the market without too 

much trouble the afternoon we got into town and it was surprisingly good. Potatoes, small tomatoes, 

onion, lettuce, sweet potato, pumpkin, chili, carrot, banana and a few other root veggies that I didn’t 

recognise. Surrounding the fresh food stalls were heaps and heaps more of the random stores. Most 

had things like candy and coffee but then there were more specialist stores. Some had lots of plastic

 buckets, one had powdered milk, frozen (or defrosting due to the lack of power during the day) sausages, 

a store with heaps of different types of sauces and condiments, hardware, electrical, a few second hand 

clothing stores, generally you could find most things there, you would just have to be willing to look. We 

managed to find ourselves some things for dinner, we got some tomato sauce, some frozen ‘chicken sausages’ 

which are just frankfurts from home (they taste amazing actually) but on the packet it says that it is 100% 

vegetarian fed chicken, which it isn’t, we got an onion, 2 eggs and a few pieces of a couple day old bread

Back at the guesthouse we found a gas stove that we later found out was not ours to use, but we managed to cook up the onion, snags and eggs and had ourselves some very basic dinner. At this point I was more than a little worried about what our food was going to consist of for the next 11 months or so. The next night was a little more difficult, due to the fact that we couldn’t use the gas stove. Luckily on Thursday last week we bought an electric hot plate for situations like this in case we didn’t have any facilities to cook. That’s not true in the kitchen is a perfectly good place to light a fire and cook stuff over the fire, I just wasn’t too keen on lighting a fire inside a kitchen, nor did I have a lighter or anything to light a fire with. So anyway, we had a similar dinner, this time pasta instead of bread, and we had pasta with onion mixed through and some tomato sauce as a dressing, mine had a few of the left over sausages from the last night as well. A good feed once again, if not basic, but due to our very small and not so hot hotplate, that meal took close to 80 minutes to prepare……..

Here are a few pics of Same

The first night we were here we had the worst night sleep ever, I think it would easily be the worst night’s sleep I have ever had. The mattresses were hard, basically like the floor, Nemo and I tried sleeping on a single mattress together, which made it worse, and it was noisy, the water pump outside the window and, if anyone ever told you that roosters only crow in the morning, they lied.  I think Nemo mentioned it earlier, but it’s worth saying again; they crow whenever they are awake. Which starts at about 4am, unless they are woken up earlier, by something else, say another rooster. Outside our window is the neighbors fence, tied to his side of the fence are not 1, not 2, but 5 roosters! Big ones, and every house in the neighborhood has one as well it seems. When one crows, every single one with in ear shot will crow back, and when you have 5 in one yard outside your window they just get stuck in an endless loop crowing at each other, with the other 50 in the neighborhood in the background and the endless dogs barking on top of that. It would be quieter in the middle of the zoo. Worst…..night……..sleep…….ever……..

When we got out of bed that morning, Naomi had had enough, I heard her something I didn’t think I would ever hear her say.

I’ve been saying since I got here that whilst in Timor I would try a few things I otherwise wouldn’t have, not because I condone it or think it’s right, but because I’m here and “when in Rome’…… do as the Romans do, or the Timorese in this case. I’ve said that I will eat dog, drink palm wine (moonshine/rocketfuel) and go watch and bet on a cock fight. She of course thinks all of those things are disgusting. Until Sunday morning, when she rolled over in-between cock-a-doodle-doos and said “I cannot wait to go see a fight and watch those two things kill each other, I think I’ll even eat chicken at lunch today to make sure there is one less of them in the world”. True to her word she has eaten chicken two days in a row now, and she calls me the monster!?!?!

Anyway, that’s it for this week, take care!

Ben and Naomi

 In this pic, there is the strangest nativity ever. A deer, a crocodile, a mermaid and Jesus was just to the right of the croc, I will have to go back and get a better pic, one with the big JC in it.

Atauro!!

Botardi!

Again it’s been so long since I wrote anything on here that it’s going to take me ages to write it all down! I will try and keep it short, but a lot has happened, thus why it has taken so long to find the time to write any other post.

Both of us have well and truly started work, both of us putting in gruelling half days around our language training, which finished up today. On Monday we were both due to work in the morning and then have class in the afternoon, it was supposed to be our first day of real work (rock up and actually do something instead of orientations). My boss was away for the day, in Melbourne for a conference, so she told me to have the day off and study my Tetun some more. Naomi however had to go in. We had been out on Atauro Island for the weekend and weren’t due to get in until 8am on Monday morning. Due to the weather being atrocious (high winds and swell) we didn’t get back until about 10am, but I was just happy we were still alive. So where we are staying is the guest house on the second floor of Naomi’s work. To get to our room we have to walk directly through the middle of her office then go up the stairs. So Naomi was supposed to be at the office at 8:30am for her first day of work, instead she rocked up at 10am, soaking wet, flippers in hand, sopped her way through the office, up the stairs, had a shower, got dressed and came back down for her first day of work at about 10:30am, before leaving at 12noon for class. Superb first impression!!!!

Her work was fine with it, they understood. Apparently the boat that we caught back is fairly unreliable and her boss and the people in Timor in general are very flexible and understanding, they just had a laugh at her and got on with whatever they were doing. Aside from work and class we have been keeping busy, bike riding, eating and drinking WAY too much and we found a cinema and watched a few flicks there. They only really show movies that have something to do with Timor (Balibo, Answered By Fire), but it’s got good air conditioning and they are worth a watch. Eating here has its ups and downs. As long as you know where to eat and more importantly where not to eat its fine, in fact (touch wood) I’m the only one who hasn’t had an upset stomach yet…….There are cooked fish markets on the foreshore, lots of Warungs (Indonesian eateries, which are REALLY cheap), a few western type places that are really expensive, a Turkish place, a Japanese place and a really good Indian Restaurant. The names of the restaurants are really creative, some of my favourites are; Indian Restaurant, Turkish Restaurant, Dili Beach Hotel, Dili Hotel, Timor Hotel, City Café, Beach Café, Dili Beach Café, Dili Beach Hotel and One More Bar.

 At one of the warungs Naomi, Paul and myself had dinner there before going to see a movie. We each ordered the same thing (fried rice), with slight variations……..Nemo had fried rice with no beef, I had friend rice with no egg and Paul had fried rice with both beef and egg. This is how they came out……..

So even at restaurants which you think are safe to eat at, sometimes you still don’t know what’s going to come out. Again, we had lunch at the homestay on Atauro Island, fish was part of the lunch…….

Pass……..

Nemo's new favourite drink

Sweat in a can? Pass……

So we moved out of our hotel room a week ago into the guest room directly above the office that Nemo works in. It was very very nice of Nemo’s organisation to allow us to use it until we head to Same. The room is much bigger than the hotel room, which was a nice change and it is on the other side of town (still on the beach, infact closer to the beach) so we now have a whole new bunch of restaurants to try out! The shower is a little interesting, it’s just a metal type hose that comes out of the wall, the water is luke warm and if you hold it in the wrong spot you give yourself a small electric shock! I suppose it’s good though, as we when we get to Same we will be using a bucket shower, so this is a nice in-between to get ourselves ready for the bucket!

There is a kitchen upstairs, but not really any cooking utensils, so we still have to eat out every night, poor us right? After 3 weeks of eating out every night, it actually gets really tedious, both of us are dying for a home cooked meal, where are you when we need you Julie!!!!! Though the facilities are good enough for us to make ourselves brecky, we get up, make some muesli with fresh fruit and sit on the balcony and look at the ocean, or the two dogs having sex, which is what was happening right out front yesterday morning during breakfast. Nemo had never seen dogs have sex before, with the mounting, then the back to back lock together, it was a fairly enlightening and humorous five minutes for her.

Our breakfast balcony, the beach is just over that road, about 50m from the balcony, the trees are blocking it from sight in this pic.

So I said earlier about this Island that we went to visit over the weekend, Atauro. We went with a few of the other vollys that are in Timor; Karen, Danni and Christianna. It was a great chance to catch up with the girls as we did our Pre Departure Training with them and we hadn’t seen them in a while, they are a good bunch of kids, if not a little crazy. It was an epic weekend, which started with a 5:30 wake up to get to the ferry by 6.30am so we could leave by 7. Needless to say the ferry actually left at about 8am…..gotta love (and anticipate) Timor Time……

The ferry was massive as you can see, they loaded a few cars, bikes, crates and even a bunch of goats, chickens and at least one cow into the hold and off we went. It was slow…….and I mean slow, I don’t know how far exactly the island is away, about the same as Rottnest I would guess, our ferry’s take about 30 mins, this thing took over 2 hours. Anyway we finally got there and the place was a tropical paradise! We got all of our luggage, loaded it into the motorbike carrier tuuk tuuk type things and headed for where we were staying

When we got to Jerry’s Place (where we were staying, apparently Barry’s Place was full, again creative names!) I was blown away. It was about 100m off the beach, at the foot of the mountains and we were staying in these little straw hut things. As you can see from the photos it was just amazing!

We had ourselves some lunch, then headed down to the beach for some snorkelling and generally just to be lazy. The snorkelling was unreal, heaps of little blue fish, star fish and thousands of other sorts of fish and crabs. After that we parked ourselves under the shade of a tree on the beach, had a few drinks, a few ‘sneks’ (snack in Tetun) and watched the tide go out for a few hours.

This beach had a huge tide, I think I had mentioned before about the massive tides in Timor, the beaches look completely different at different times of the day. We came back the same spot in the morning when the tide was in, check out the difference!

 

While we were there Nemo made a friend. There was a little kid, who didn’t speak English, nor Tetun and was really interested in us. He sat in the bushes just behind us, in plain sight, for over an hour, just watching us. We tried to talk to him a few times, but he just sat there and stared blankly back at us. Then one of the girls noticed him climbing a tree, he got all the way to the top and started raiding a birds nest. Nemo tried to help the boy back down the tree by offering to hold the nest while he climbed down but instead he passed her one of the little birds from the nest… In the end we think he was trying to tell us that he was going to raise the birds, but I reckon he ate them…..

Over the next few days we got up to a heap of things; a few naps, lots of reading, dinner at an Italian restaurant that would put most in Freo to shame a long walk on the beach for an hour or two in which we saw a crocodile, or what we thought might have been a crocodile, then it might have been a crocodile, then even when we thought it wasn’t a crocodile, we walked up to it slowly. Turns out it was the most crocodile looking log of driftwood I have ever seen! 

 A horse tied to a tree

 The center of town

 The girls on the way to the Italian Restaurant

I also had my first bucket shower, my first squatting toilet experience, which was a little more interesting than it should have been due to some incorrect instructions from Nemo on how to use it. Which, without being too graphic, ended with me ‘reverse kanga-ing’ the squat toilet. There was also a big cultural festival on that weekend on the island, which was a nice coincidence as the girls got to filter through the markets and we got to see a whole bunch of traditional dancing and singing. There was one particular cultural song/dance that will stay with me for the rest of my life. It was haunting, words cannot explain, but I will try (luckily Nemo has a video of it, so we might try and upload it one day). It was a constant beat, fast but not crazy, then just two gongs over the top of it, one high and one low, about 4 seconds apart, that was the whole song and they literally played it for hours and hours without stopping once. At one point we rocked up, they were playing it, so we listened to it for about 20 minutes. We go bored of it after a while so we went to the markets, beach and walked around town for over an hour, came back, same song, same people playing the instruments, same, if not more people dancing. The dancing didn’t have two much structure, just a basic two or three step shuffle, with everyone going it their own direction. There were machetes and sticks being waved around and random high pitch squeals that broke up the steady trance type hypnotism that you fell into after 5 minutes of listening to it. It sounded like the music being played in a generic Hollywood blockbuster when someone has been caught by a jungle tribe, they are hog tied to a stick and hung over a fire while the cauldron is boiling ready for the tribe to eat them. Serious hypnotism type stuff, I said I wouldn’t have been surprised if we all woke up that night in a random place holding a machete doing the weird two step! Haunting….

On Monday morning we were up again before sunrise to head home on the ‘water taxi’. The ferry only runs on Saturdays, so that’s good for a half day trip or if you want to go for a week, for everything else there is the water taxi. The ferry is $5 and takes just over 2 hours and the water taxi is $30 and takes 90 mins, or so they claim. Being that the water taxi is 6 times the price of the ferry I was actually expecting (stupidly) something similar to the Rottnest ferries, only to rock up and see this

Though that picture wasn’t taken at the time, when we got on the boat there was a massive swell and a howling wind. It is an 8 seat dingy basically, defiantly didn’t look like it could handle the 20+km in-between the islands in this weather. Anyway after a short delay because the wind was too strong to leave, we boarded the boat for departure, even though the wind didn’t die down, the owner was just board of waiting. She also decided that this morning she would charge everyone $5 more and call it a fuel price hike, even though we had confirmed the price and departure time twice with her during the week. Anyway, the seas were rough, girls were throwing up everywhere (you know who you are), waves were constantly crashing over the boat, us and all our luggage was drenched and even the driver looked worried at times. In fact I expected him to turn around at one point, he stayed as close to the beach as he could for about an hour, going around to a point on the island where he could make the shortest bee-line back to Dili, he then let the boat idle for a minute or so and just stared out at the swell, cringing, filling me with confidence…… Then he went. I just put myself to sleep to avoid worrying about it, if I woke up in the water then so be it, I wasn’t going to sit there for 90 more minutes watching every wave hoping we didn’t capsize. In the end he must have been a really good captain and knew what he was doing as we made it back to Dili, two or so hours late, completely drenched, but everyone was safe and on dry land!

This week in Dili has been really interesting, the elections are tomorrow and this week all of the major political parties were allocated one day each in which they could do a massive campaign through the streets. First CNRT, then Fretlin, then the other smaller ones later in the week. They were all quite impressive, in size, fanaticism and noise levels, but it was on the Monday when CNRT had theirs that I was truly impressed. They were probably the biggest, but not by too much, the procession that roamed the streets for the day had in excess of 50 trucks loaded with people, speakers, flags and the like, hundreds upon hundreds of motorbikes either side of the trucks, another 50 or 60 cars and heaps of people running alongside. All of them making as much noise as they possibly could. When it went past our language class it would have easily taken 5 minutes for them all to get by us and they would have been going at 30-40kph, it was huge. It’s a shame I didn’t get a photo because words cannot do justice to the size or the noise that these guys made!!! That went on all week, as I said, each party had their own day to do exactly the same thing.

We had been advised to stock up on some supplies on the off chance things get a little crazy tomorrow, things like water, canned foods and all those survival type things. I think it will be fine over the weekend, if anything sizable is to happen it’s probably going to be early next week when the results start coming through, but I am sure it will be fine. Anyway we decided we should make a survival kit just in case

·        4 bottles of water

·        2 bottles of red wine

·        1 block of Cadbury (very expensive here) Chocolate

·        2 cans of baked beans

·        1 deck of cards

·        3 pirated moves from the Timorese equivalent of ‘jb hi fi’

·        1 bag of muesli

·        5 packets of Mi Goreng Noodles

·        A satellite phone

·        The delivery menu for the amazing Indian Restaurant down the road

I think we should be alright; either way Nemo and I are going to have a decent night tonight J

Miss you all, speak soon!!!

Ben and Nemo

PS: Skype works pretty well here just send us a message if you want our usernames!

PPS: Sorry that some of the pics are really low quality, they were actually all amazing quality, like 6m each, but i shrunk them to make them quicker to upload, apparently i shrunk them a little too much. 

Here is a random family of pigs and the view from the front of language classes to make it up to you!