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.