My Monotony

This week seems to have been the same monotonous run of work, keeping Timorese employed, supplying Bibles, fielding new requests, fixing things that have broken and managing sickness and injuries. Seems a bit boring but I’ll try to pull out some interesting stories.
The girls discovered straw hats.
One story is a Nigerian Doctor who called me a bit out of the blue to ask for help to build a shed for his plastic bottle recycling plant so he can earn money to support his Epilepsy treatment and advocacy organisation. Make sense? He’s a big man with a big heart. I’ll see if I can find time to see him this week. He has 40 tonnes of bottles stacked up – mountains! Did you know that they sell for 50c a kilo? While meeting me at home, he got to check out Cynthia who was suffering a fever and tonsillitis. Also, he’s part of a small local church and was very happy to receive a box of scriptures giving me the same expression I’ve heard so often, “Wow we’ve been wanting to find scriptures in Tetun for so long but didn’t know where to get them. This is amazing!”
I was also helping folks to buy all their gear for a good solar system for their library in the mountains – a bit of an art to assemble a workable system in this country. At the end of the day we dropped off their gear at Ahisaun (a disability centre) and I just happened to be introduced as the man who distributes Bibles to a Catholic priest there who works in Hata-bulico (quite remote mountain town). He is from an Indonesian island called Flores. He was very keen to get some Bibles so he followed me home and I gave him 50 New Testaments and some other scriptures for his Bible study groups including one of the precious last remaining copies of Genesis (the only OT scripture available). It turns out that his name is in the epilogue of the New Testament as one of the Priests who checked the translation. This is an important connection for me to ensure I can continue buying Bibles from the Catholic distributor without getting too hassled.
Padre Adriano from Flores, working in the mountains of Hata-bulico
The following night, at the markets, I met a girl working with PALMS (Catholic volunteer agency) who seemed rather desperate to build a fence in ... Hatabulico! Small world. The problem they face is that animals are getting to the village spring and they want to protect it as well as their vegetable gardens. I’m hoping I can help them with a bamboo fence. I am so wrapped in bamboo! There are three things you need here to grow a garden, three things to secure food for your family – 1. A good water supply, 2. A good fence, and 3. A willing heart to work. If you can help the Timorese with these three fundamental things then they can grow good gardens. We packed up from the markets to come home to find the truck had died yet again. After a couple of hours I called my mate, Anen, who came and wobbled a piece of wire in the engine bay where a fuse should have been and had the truck started in 2 minutes flat. I rumbled into home after 1 am. The vehicles are a bit of a drama – three flat tyres this week and the accelerator cable snapped on the Suzuki. Last week, the brakes on the truck started smoking and I had to reset one side including pulling apart the slave cylinder. Still struggling with it.
Started building the chook pen this week as a demonstration concept on how to keep chooks more in a more viable way. 6ft fence made from ... bamboo! I have taught boys who have taught other boys who now work for me making fences.
Finalised drawings for submission to government for the new conference centre for the Nazarene Church. We hope to get them water this week and then start on their land drainage problem because the rains have just started. (Our ‘you-beaut’ all-natural thatched roof leaks, doh!)

The family has been sick and its been difficult for Cynthia. She’s a brave lass. The kids are also pining for the sweet delicacies of the mother country.Israel working hard in our new veggie patch. 

The Truth About Rango

We saw the movie Rango the other day.  It was pirated, but that’s all they sell in the shops in this country.  I hope that this blog may entice a couple of people to pay to see the movie and hence I will justify my pirated copy through free advertisement.  Anyway, although the thing is a little quirky, I found myself associating with the character – Rango.  I mean, I am just a little odd, I have walked into a world in which the “source of societal discontentment” is often water and then I pretend that I am the man who can save the day even though I have little idea of how to do it.  There is a sinister side to the water and ultimately there is evil lurking around the corner, controlling the water, oppressing the people and strangling their crops.  To save the day you have  to eyeball the evil and make your stand even though you know you are dealing with a very powerful figure.  I’m sure I will die one day, probably from infection.  Funny movie but very real.  Of course this all only makes sense with God in the background, weaving his magic, revealing his power.  
These are garden beds put in by the Nazarene church youth in an attempt to get some income.  These are full of dead vegies – hope that dried up when their bore failed.  Its now late into the dry season and their bore was not bashed down far enough.  I am trying to help them get the bore down further.  Just on the quiet, I’ve never done boring work before.  The farm I grew up on relied on a spring further up the hill and the water came down by gravity.  But now, in true naive style I have been dubbed the expert.  We employed a guy to do the work but the chain on the pulley he uses to pull up the bore pipe snapped and he has given up.  I bought a three tonne pulley (block and endless chain type) and with a bit of grunting in the bottom of the dry well with a Timorese and 200 mozzies we somehow managed to pull out the pipe. 
The simple way to make a bore in this country is to bash a 40mm diameter steel pipe into the ground as far as you can.  Then pull out the pipe however you can and clean out the dirt stuck inside.  Repeat this process until you hit water – preferably in a sandy layer.  Then pull out the pipe,  clean it one last time and bash the bottom end flat into a “spear” shape.  You cut some grooves just above the spear end to let water seep in and then bash the pipe into the ground to stay.  Because this bore pipe did not go far enough down we had to cut off the spear and bash it down and add another length to the pipe with a joiner.  This is where I made my fatal flaw.  I didn’t tighten the join up properly.  We bashed the join about 2.4m down into the ground and the join came apart.  Now our options are to bash a whole new pipe or, if brave and dumb enough, climb down the bottom of the well and try to dig down to the join put a chain on it and pull it out.  It is possible, so long as the whole thing doesn’t collapse.  Save on burial costs I suppose.  Perhaps some heroes are just idiots who happened to survive.

Soibada – Mary’s Heart

They say that Soibada was once planned to be the capital of East Timor. It is right in the heart of the country and is home to the national sanctuary for Mary, the mother of Jesus. In its hay day it was the centre of excellence and the main training centre for Priests. Many famous folks like Jose Ramos Horta spent schooling days here.


   

My family in ruins!

Those days are gone now and the town is left with the ancient ruins of a bygone era. There is an incredible feel as you wander through the deserted old stone buildings. The Timorese boys led us into dark and dusty rooms with the old relics of the church. One boy motioned to a body under a blanket and said in all seriousness, “That’s the dead lady.” Cautiously I lifted up the blanket to find a statue of Jesus, crucified. I was surprised – perhaps a little horrified. That here in this place after such teaching, they still didn’t know who had died for them.
In Soibada, there is a children’s home which we visited with our friends – Darren and Celeste, and Josh, Josiah and Renee. A couple of lovely nuns here look after around 40 kids. Darren and Celeste brought up a heap of stationary for the kids and checked out the laptops that they brought last time they were up. We were able to give some women’s sanitary pads from Cynthia’s sewing room kindly donated by funds from friends of Celeste (she’s been busy fundraising in Melbourne). I also got to take them around 70 scriptures and share a story with the kids on the gospel of Mark.  The juice was running so I got the kids to act out some scenes which they really enjoyed.  I walked around with Sister Mary, one of the nuns and asked what their needs were.  She said that water was very difficult for them.  There are lots of issues surrounding their water difficulty.  We found two potential sites to dig for water but unfortunately these sites were sacred and couldn’t be touched.  It was looking grim when Sister Mary finally mentioned that they have a little problem with their kitchen in that when they sweep the floor a puddle of water forms always in the same spot coming from underneath the concrete.  This is downhill from a potential spring – it would be funny if God heard Sister Mary’s heart and gave them water right there in their kitchen.  I am not sure though if I will ever get back to help them with their water problem.  Many issues like this don’t have a quick fix.  It is better to walk with them over time to truly know the problem and give more time to help them through it.  Never the less it was great to be there and encourage them in their ministry and see how they operate.  I pray that God looks kindly on this children’s home and blesses Mary’s heart.
 

Thanks God for Friends

Geoff, Lynne, Chloe and Hannah have returned back to Darwin.  Their line was “use and abuse us.”  We hope that we accommodated their wish to some extent
They got involved in heaps of things that we were doing as well as doing their own stuff.  In our office we have a whiteboard with an eclectic mix of various jobs.  They were happy to check out the list and attempt to cross some off.  Here’s a few of the other things they got up to not including the last post:
    Inaugurating the new table tennis set – Thanks heaps to Michelle for bringing it and Pastor Steve and others from the CRC church in Darwin.
  Going snorkelling, Geoff gets his first crayfish!  
One of Lynne’s tasks was to try to get my accounting all in order which turned out to be quite difficult as most of it exists in that mysterious grey matter between my ears. However, with great perseverance she managed to pull together a very snappy looking excel file on our Bible distribution accounting. I am very grateful for this work and have enjoyed entering figures into it and seeing how the finances are also travelling in this area. Just for your info (and hopefully trying not to boast) we have distributed around 1600 scriptures since August. I’m still yet to enter the data for previous months.

Helping out at Atabae with Celia and Polyanna in a minsitry with WEC.  They got involved in kids activities as well as posed as professional plumbers.
  Assessing the big catch, which unfortunately was not on Geoff’s line.  This was a decent looking Marlin hauled in by a local guy in a tiny dugout canoe with a timber paddle.  Impressive feat!
Geoff was called upon to take our neighbour through the hairy streets of Dili to hospital.  She unexpectedly went into labour after some complications.  Both mother and bub survived (despite Geoff’s driving ;)  ) to deliver a beautiful baby boy.
being friends
    having fun at the markets
   sharing sunsets on our beach
 Geoff saw everything as a potential lure for those illusive Timor fish.
One of Geoff’s main goals was getting that little fishing business off the ground. It could be described as a dismal failure if you’re feeling dismal but I’d rather see it as one of those learning failures. Its like what you just have to try in order to realise its not going to work. I think one of the difficult things for Geoff was the lack of application coming from the main Timorese man he was trying to help. Most times we had to go and get him up out of bed to go out fishing. Financially it was a bit of a loss. So Geoff and I did a lot of talking about how to go forward and how to make the most of the cool things such as the sounder that was donated. Lets just say that the challenge is still out there for a keen fisherman to come and find the fish!
Assisting in agricultural development on the island of Atauro
Getting close and personal travelling in our 2 seater suzuki – 8 bodies!  (Truck is on the blink again)
Making 5 cupboards for the Kids Ark school – a massive job.
In their last week, Michelle, a friend from Darwin, also came to see life in Timor and lend a hand.  We thank Michelle for the goodies brought from the Darwin CRC church.  We also thank her for organising our keys, lending a hand in the kitchen, looking after the kids and getting involved in many of our activities.
              
Thanks heaps guys!        

Some other friends…

During all this mayhem we had another two visitors from Brisbane – Rod and Rob.  This made a fairly full house of 12 people for a little while.  Rod is a physio and was able to get around to a number of different institutions to talk about the possibility of bringing teams over next year.  Rob is a chippy (carpenter) and I sincerely appreciated his help in making shelving for Bible and medicine storage and an awesome desk in our office.  They also donated a printer to replace our last one that died.  Its big job is to print resources for our Bible distribution and in the last two weeks has printed around 100 kids activity books to go with the gospel of Mark.
Thanks guys, your visit and your prayers were very encouraging.

Liquidoe

Click on the little film here to download while you read (3Mb)
Last week we went to a mountain village called Liquidoe (Lick-i-doy) where a young Timorese man, called Mateus, is trying to build a school.  It is about a two hour drive up into the mountains behind Dili into some fairly rugged country.  Up there we found that the community had given Mateus a mountain top to build his school.  The school has been running for around 6 years using a small building at the back of a church.  We had no money to give him but we were able to lend him $1000 as he was very keen to get his building going.  With this money he put most of the roof sheeting on and constructed the foundations.  He has almost payed back the money using his own wages.  It is a touching story of vision, dedication and love for his own people.  He receives funding from an organisation called Serving Our World for his school feeding program and also some money for teachers wages.  What we like about this project is that it is uniquely Timorese.  If there is someone out there who would be interested in assisting with this project then please let us know. 




The automatic car got a flat battery so we tried jump starting using some odd bits of metal – it didn’t work.
While at the school we also distributed some scriptures to them and the local church along with a school activity book we have produced to go with the gospel of Mark to assist the kids in literacy and help them to know the story of Jesus.  Our inverter doesn’t run lights as well as the printer so we folded the books by candlelight.


Other things we’ve been up to…
Cynth got to deliver some women’s washable sanitary pads to the ladies.  Thanks for those kind women in Melbourne who donated funds for this.  These have gone to Liquidoe and to a birthing clinic in Sidara as part of a maternity pack to assist women especially with bleeding after the birth.
The sewing group received a new donation from NSW.  Thanks so much to the Grafton Salvos (our home church) and the kind folks in Maclean, family and friends.  It was great to receive all the material and sewing supplies and the women were very surprised and happy.
      
The Beckitt family, Geoff, Lynne, Chloe and Hannah have been working very hard trying to cross jobs off our very random looking job list.  They are very loving and kind and supportive and its been a great boost to us.  A few examples are shown below – Geoff fixing a gas leak with a washer he made from his old croc shoes, the girls laying some paving in the veggie garden, making 3 new sewing tables for the sewing group and Lynne assisting in the sewing room.  The old singer she is using here is an early electric model powered by pushing a lever sideways with your right knee.  They are launching into building some more cupboards for new classrooms being built at Kids Ark.
   

The Catch

 
Geoff and his Timorese fishing buddies came back! Now that’s a good thing. The boat came back as well which is a bonus. Now we’ve got to look on the bright side of things because, well, they didn’t catch a staggering amount of fish. The 3 day voyage cost $115 in fuel, bait, tackle and ice and they came back and sold the fish on the beach for $65. Hmmm...the maths doesn’t quite work in our favour. We got one free fish out of it too. I suppose that's something. Geoff had a great time experiencing island culture but it was very tiring trying to sleep out on the boat in the water. So what should we do? The Timorese man, Gomez, has asked to keep the $65 to plough into the next trip – fuel, ice etc (He still has the tackle and he caught his own bait). The seas are good, probably the best they’ll get all year. If he comes back with $65 worth this time you’d think it was hardly worth it. But perhaps there’s a bigger catch – where Gomez sees the love and concern we have for his life to go to this extent to raise him out of poverty. Who knows? The big man upstairs. I can just hear him bellow now – “Throw your nets on the right side of the boat!!!” May God give us wisdom in this difficult case.
Other things that have been plugging along are the women’s sewing group bellekria. They have been going to the weekly markets in Dili. Our construction team got some Australian investor to put up money for another building. Bible distribution is rising up from a sleepy period and looking exciting. We are working with a small Catholic team and they sold around 150 scriptures at a recent youth conference.  I just bought another 180 New Testaments. We hope to go up into the mountains tomorrow to distribute Bibles in a school and help them in a few other ways. 
  

To Teach a Man to Fish

The title to this blog seems a little sexist in this post, post modern world but that’s the way the saying goes. You only ever see men here in East Timor fishing. Have you heard the saying before? “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a life time.” Generally we nod and say true, true – I never thought I would become embroiled in the literal application of the meaning. Its a lot more involved than a one liner. First we got a boat which just happened to come our way on a very good deal. Then it turned out the Timorese guy didn’t really catch a lot of fish with it. Then I worked with him to put a roof on the boat, print business cards (diversifying) and appoint a marketing manager. Still no luck. Now we have Geoff to save the day! He has come from Darwin with his wife and two kids. Geoff is a keen fishermen and is eager to go fishing with our Timorese fisherman, Gomez. More than that, he has brought a sounder and a GPS! This means we can identify good fishing locations by looking at underwater formations and mark the position with a GPS. It might sound like cheating to some people and perhaps a bit of a leap from dugout canoes to the 21^st century. We’re not saying we’re doing the right thing but we’re just having a go at helping a guy put food on his table. So the boat is rigged up with the sounder, GPS, lifejackets, old fridge for icing the catch, a 12V light and some pretty good tackle. Geoff has switched his thinking from fishing for sport to fishing for survival and they are off on a three day journey to the island to catch as much fish as possible. They’ve been out of phone range for 2 days now so I hope it is all ok. Thanks heaps to those people who have put in to support this venture. Lets see how many fish they catch and then ultimately whether Geoff can “teach a man to fish.” (Even if they don’t speak a common language – minor detail).