Friday, May 7, 2010

UN to the Rescue!

Ok, here's an interesting story about the UN doing a rescue job in our village.  This is not to bag the UN so much.  I think they do a lot of necessary things somewhere.  So we have a UN worker who lives nearby.  He's a very nice man with a long term association with Timor.  He was driving home late Saturday night in his UN 4WD and ran off into the deep ditch very badly.  Next morning he calls the UN security rescue crew, who (with great damage to the car) gets the car out of the ditch.  It is a massive tow truck.  The driver, (a large sweaty Croation) then proceeds to turn around and comes all the way down to our house and enters the small windy track to the beach between our poor neighbour's garden and the local cemetery.  4 hours later, he is totally wedged between some graves he has run over and a tree.  The UN police arrive to oversee the swelling crowd of disgruntled and bewildered villagers and provide "technical' assistance to the driver.  They constitute a various mix of Asian, European and African cultures all with their own cultural tendencies and hand signals.  (common language is English, none of them speak Tetun).  As you can imagine, the Croatian driver gets sweatier and even more stuck.  He is now just staying clear of the graves but destroying trees and the fence along the other side.  4 hours later they call in a massive forklift to shift the back end of the truck around the trees.  Another 2 hours and the truck is out - at one time the truck and forklift were driving together in a weird articulated combo.  The villagers as yet have received no help or compensation for the damage even though it is promised.  The neighbour, whose husband is dying, asked if I could bring some nails so she could fix her fence.  Hmmm...

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