Independence Day

The 20th of May was the 10 year anniversary of independence for East Timor, or as they say here, “the restoration of independence.”  That’s because way back in 1975 when the Portuguese pulled out, the Timorese declared themselves as a country and even appointed a president.  Unfortunately, it only lasted a few months before the Indonesians invaded.  So 2012 is ten years on from 2002 when East Timor received official recognition from the world that they were an independent country.  East Timor was actually governed by a United Nations transitional administration from 1999 (independence vote) until 2002.  The 19th of May is actually the big day which leads up to midnight.  This is how our day went…
5.00am I get up to prepare for our boat to go to Atauro with Rahel (a Swiss girl in WEC) who is taking a group of Timorese to the island.  It was a first time for them to do an activity like this and it was actually Rahel’s final adventure before leaving the country.  (Thanks Rahel for all you did here in TL!)


9.30am I leave to pick up Mateus to try to get to Liquidoe in the mountains behind Dili.  To do this we had to weave our way through a myriad of tiny back streets dodging police blockades put in place to clear the roads for all the dignitaries arriving from overseas for the big night.  Timorese love a party and they love blocking roads to make their party look more prestigious.  By some miracle we made it through and up the mountain and after a couple of hours driving through the usual hair raising landslides we came to Liquidoe.  (Ok, this time I was genuinely a little concerned about one particular landslide.)

11.30am Inspect the building works that Mateus is doing on his school extension program. Its progressing, albeit slow and basic.  He’s all heart and making a good effort.  The bush poles which constitute his school building are now clothed in Indonesian corrugated iron and the roof is completed.  The next step is doors and mesh for windows and a simple concrete floor.  Then a simple kitchen and toilet and hopefully the place will be ready for the first students.

   
12pm Lunch with Pastor Delphin to discuss a building project by Castle Hill Church.  They’d contacted me to see if I could shed some light on the situation about if the pastor was happy for them to prepare to build a school building for a preschool program he is involved in.  Unfortunately, it didn’t go so positive but I gave it my best shot.  (Castle Hill – report is coming your way soon) On the upside, Pastor Delphin was building something using mud bricks made by locals.  This inspired Mateus and he is very interested in using mud bricks for his building.
OPPORTUNITY FOR ADVENTURE:  Mud brick building in East Timor
Do you have some building skills with mud bricks or know anyone who has?  We could really do with someone coming over for a few weeks to show Timorese a few skills in mud brick building.  The mud bricks could be prepared before you come and we can assist in accommodating you.  Only for the adventurous in heart (serious request!)
1.30 pm Then I helped Mateus and his staff of “Serving Our World” to hand out school packs for his students who seemed to pour out of the mountains in a continual stream.  Each pack included: a school bag (mostly pink but the boys didn’t seem worried), a box of coloured pencils, a lead pencil and an exercise book.  The kids were pretty happy.  There’s a bit of very noticeable malnutrition and stunted growth among the students which reflects the tough, dry mountain environment in which they are trying to survive.

After this, we zoomed back down the mountain to pick our way back through road blocks and finally make it home.
5.30pm We then received the tired adventurers back from Atauro and pushed the boat back up the beach.
9.30pm After dinner we launched the boat again with a small crew from Seeds of Life to cruise around to Tasi Tolu (the beach where they held the Independence Day celebrations)  We picked our way through East Timor’s small naval fleet of half a dozen boats hoping that we didn’t look like invaders and skilfully missed the reef (almost) to land on the beach.  Here we found a stack of dignitaries including the President of Indonesia and Australia’s governor general among many others. 


VIPs galore gather at midnight.                       The people enjoy live music.
The Timorese president serves five years.  Hence, after 10 years, right on midnight, they raise the Timorese flag and appoint the new president – Taur Matan Ruak. 

Flag raising ceremony               Tau Matan Ruak hugs Horta         

I think its an historic moment for East Timor with a sense that they are really moving forward and at least beginning to see a brighter future emerge out of their difficult past.  It was marked with a great display of fireworks – probably the longest lasting that I’ve ever seen.

     Martin, Rob, John and I

1.00am We headed back home on the boat (avoiding all the traffic jams which was the point of going in a boat), pushed it up on shore and flopped into bed.  Thank you, Lord!

The Corn Mill

I have been working with Lino and Atina in Los Palos to build up a small agriculture business.  This is mainly centred around the growing, storing and selling of corn.  On the side, Lino asked about getting a corn mill.  Its a grinding machine that breaks up the corn into crumbs (not flour) for the villagers to make a soupy, porridge type meal.  He says that people will pay about $1 to have 10kg of corn milled.  The mill itself costs $680.  I didn’t do much on the business analysis side except to ask how many people would come each day to get corn milled and I think we had it worked out.  Lino was pretty keen to get the machine and somehow I just went with it – probably because he was brave enough to try my idea of buying a silo for the corn.  Thanks to the boys in Darwin for some of the start up funds for the mill.  Its a Chinese machine with a crank handle to get it going.  The motor (blue part) is a diesel and the guy in the shop couldn’t get it going for the first hour because the pump mechanism was stuck.  He drained the oil and pulled off a side plate to make some adjustments so when the video shows the motor going we were all actually pretty relieved.  The motor drives a flat belt which drives the mill (yellow part).
As I couldn’t take it to Los Palos, Lino arranged to come into Dili to put it onto the back of a bus.  For Atina, it was only the third time in her life to come down into the “big smoke” of Dili.  The second time for her was at the start of this year when they came to our place for a church conference.  Although she got very sick on the bus (vomitted a few times) she really wanted to make the 8 hour journey to see Dili.  She is a few months pregnant now so this may be her last chance for a year or two.  The machine is not exceedingly heavy but there was a fork lift nearby so we made use of it.  They tied it up well and Lino says he got it home ok.  We also bought a set of scales – very archaic (think ancient Egypt), a shovel and a scythe for their business.  He brought us a sack of corn from the first crop for our chickens. 


Seeds of Life have researched a new white corn for the Ministry of Agriculture to release to the people.  It is about to be launched so I decided to buy some early and hope to get it to Lino to plant soon.  It will be harvested in 4 months and be ready to sell as seed for the next wet season (begins November) so we hope to get a good price for it as it will be the first season that most farmers get to plant it.  This is all part of the game of trying to guess the future market.  We’ll see how it goes.  
 
Some other pics…
WEC wanted to film their dance class on the beach, so they asked if they could run an extension lead from Sonrei to power the music and some spotlights.  Cynthia and the kids enjoyed watching the free concert, so did a number of young guys on their way home along the beachfront.

 
Cynthia Hosted the most recent homeschooling afternoon.  She had a new family come along making 10 kids all up.  Here they are creating a marble race track using found materials! What fun!
 
Some sea activity…  A large army “boat” zoomed along the coast…

 And on Wed Anen, one of our neighbours ran to ask me if “they” could borrow our boat to go and fetch another neighbour, Gomez.  He had gone fishing way out at the horizon in a larger dugout with his small motor.  Apparently the motor broke down, so he had been attempting to paddle back but it was getting dark and they were worried about him.  He made it back fine.

Another load of boxes arrived through Rotary (From our home town -the Lower Clarence area of northern NSW.  The girls had fun opening all the fabric boxes and going through each and every piece to appoint its future use.  The boxes also contained a huge number of fabric inserts lovingly made by some sweet women in Oz.  Most went straight into packaging ready to be distributed.

HIAM Health invited us to attend an important ceremony.  Ramos Horta agreed to become their patron.  It was great to see Laura and Nathalia who were both vollunteering back in 2004 when we first met HIAM Health.
    
Samuel attended a Grand opening ceremony of a new Ag centre.  He took the opportunity to grab a few pics of a traditonal dance.

Samuel also met up with a Gideons group.

The Salvation Army in East Timor

 

Well its official … ish.  I am signing up to join The Salvation Army.  I think its about time I pull my head in and become accountable to something.   I hope that our somewhat humble operation here might serve as an inspiration to the broader Army to get into the action here.  We’ll see.  But here I am and you can expect to see the logo for The Salvation Army become more prominent as essentially the work we do here will be Salvation Army work.  I hope that this does not serve to alienate those faithful churches who have been interested and supportive of our work.  Indeed, this work has an inter-denominational support base and it certainly has a strong inter-denominational outcome in terms of the many churches and non-church groups we support here.
If you are in the Salvation Army we want to extend a special invite for you to come to East Timor.  We have a room for you here!
Since we are on the subject of church groups, here’s a list of who we’ve had something to do with in East Timor:
Catholic, Nazarene, Baptist, Seventh Day Adventist, Assemblies of God, Potter’s House, Presbyterian, IPTL (Protestant) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (hope I haven’t missed anyone out).

Getting it out to the people

As I now have a full time job I need to think up a different approach to keeping our other various activities going.  So I book up a few meetings here and there.  Pastor Samuel on the motorbike has come to visit me with Lino from Los Palos.  We met for 2 nights going quite late to discuss churchy things and corny things.  There’s the progress (or lack thereof) on the Nazarene Conference Centre in Dili, Bibles, and future plans for the Church in Los Palos.  We hope to start a youth accommodation centre out there soon – we’ll probably just wait on a go ahead from the Nazarene director in Indonesia. We sketched up a rough plan for a 7.2m x 6m building to house 12 youth and a study corner.  I also discussed with him one of the latest fad words in aid work which is “sustainability”.  That is, if we build this thing and the youth come, who’s going to pay to feed them?  We discussed the possibility of work in gardens and corn fields.  It was great having Lino there.  He said he’d be happy to set up a corn field and have them work in it to earn the funds for their accommodation.  For the youth, they’d have a safe place to live while attending secondary highschool and can be a part of Pastor Samuel’s youth training program.  We also talked about the Leader’s Bible Course getting written up and I showed him a first draft of a character study session. 
Lino was there to talk corn.  I want to ramp this up and explore ways we can build up to 20 tonne storage in villages that grow lots of corn.  We kept throwing around ideas and budgeting and I’m still not sure which way we should be going.  He asked for a corn mill which costs around $700 and will allow him to mill corn for the community.  People pay $1 to get 10kg of corn milled. Apparently its a thriving business opportunity.  Heck, I haven’t tried anything new for a while so we might as well get into the corn milling business.  I also hope to send another silo out there for him and later in the year some barbed wire to fence off another hectare.  I offered a silo to another farmer but he feels he can not pay it off in two years with his family of 10 children.  It might sound mean but from experience, I think I should stick to my guns on this one.  I’d rather go in on a two year repayment plan and show grace later if he cant pay rather than go on a very loose plan of “pay it off when you can”.  What I really want to know is if the farmer believes in the idea of a silo so much that he’s will to enter in on a contract to repay it.  Any farmer out their will take  a silo for free and you cant be sure they’re going to use it for what its made for – to give them greater food security.
Pastor Samuel will go back to Los Palos with his box of 60 Bibles.  Other churches out there are asking for them.  We’ve also supplied 6 guitars to go as part of their home church network.

The Presidential Election in East Timor

    

Next Monday is the final vote to choose the next President who will hold the position for the next 5 years. Stickers are going up on walls, meetings are being held around the country and I’m sure the whole thing is on the news every night. (Although many Timorese have access to a TV, I am still yet to get one – things of the devil, really, those TVs) Must be much the same as the American presidential campaign. Except here, people travel in the back of trucks along muddy roads to get to one of these “pick me!” meetings while someone’s scrambling to set up a generator to run the loudspeaker because the electricity is on the blink. Some folks are probably wondering whether its worth going on a 4 day, dangerous and trying journey to make their 5 minute vote count.

So its between Taur Matan Ruak (Two Sharp Eyes) and Lu Olo. Xanana Gusmao (current prime minister) is supporting Taur Matan Ruak while Lu-Olo is backed by the mighty Fretilin Party. I myself would probably go for Taur Matan Ruak but, as a stab in the dark, I think Lu-Olo might win. The most important thing for this country is that we get through the next 5 years with peace.

Below a UN security guy gives us a wave from the top of his beast – he’s going to leave this thing for me after the UN pulls out ;)  The election posters to the right are to encourage people to not be violent (hapara = to stop).  The middle picture shows martial arts representatives doing the whole group hug thing to show its all good, no hard feelings

Note that it has just been announced that the Parliamentary election will be held on July the 7th.

 

I have been travelling through the mountains teaching maths to agriculture workers this week. That means 4 days away from Cynthia, Serenity and Israel. Why maths? Well, because maths is just the greatest subject in the world! Apart from that … hmmm … oh yes, numbers do come in handy when you’re trying to grow enough food for a nation. For example, I want to set up grain storage in sheds holding 20 tonnes. My plan is to use 2000L Silos but corn is not 1kg = 1L (like water) so I’ll need 12 Silos. Who cares? Well, I want to run this as a financially viable proposition so that the farmers actually pay for the facility through corn sales. So we need to explore the cost of the silos ($640), cost of shed ($3000?), income from sales at 50c/kg etc etc. I rang a company today in the mountains that said they buy about 8000 tonnes of corn a year and want to double it. Do the maths right and it means $4,000,000 worth of corn (remember that 1000kg = 1 tonne). And they buy it all from Thailand because its cheaper and better quality. In 2010, they added in just 10 tonne of Timorese corn which just happened to have too high a level of phytotoxins. It contaminated their production line and the plant was shut down for 4 months – ouch. Its not a simple game. But I hope to God I can win; I hope, for the Timorese sake, we can win. That’s just a small reason why maths is important.

So what sort of things does a maths teacher carry on the road in East Timor? Well, I’ll need some Bibles to share along the way, then there’s the multimeter because, sure as eggs, some long lost missionary in the mountains is going to have a solar system not quite working, then there’s the battery drill because when I arrive I’m going to have to hammer drill into a concrete wall to mount a white board (which I also threw into the back of the ute), a toothbrush as I’ll be away for a few days and amongst all this is a data projector which leads ultimately to a scramble for a generator because inevitably the electricity is on the blink … again.

A Change in the Wind

  So I’ve started my job at  Seeds of Life which is going well.  There is a certain scepticism I have about the hype around climate change.  Its all very dramatic and if the world is not going to end in the next 5 years then its probably not worth talking about.  Has anyone noticed a “world is going to end” sort of theme going on for the last 20 odd years?  When I was in high school it was the nuclear war that was going to kill us all.  I suppose that lost its flavour after a while so we moved on to the hole in the ozone layer – we’re all gonna fry!  Pretty soon that started shrinking, which was handy, because we had to get ready for the doom and gloom of the year 2000 when all our cars, computers and fridges would stop working.  The world almost ended.  Thankfully, very smart computer programmers were able to change 1999 to 2000 and so we moved on.  Terror reared its ugly head when those planes crashed and suddenly we’re all gonna die again.  But no, thankfully we were saved by a few ‘pre-emptive strikes’ variously aimed at oily folks.  Once that was sort of mostly squished, there seemed no one else to turn to except big Al – the slick, sophisticated and educated face of global warming.  Now just in case things take a swing and we start cooling instead, lets just cover our bases and call it “climate change”.  And thats where you find me – saving the world once again.

If my new boss reads this post I should add, in all attempts to be serious, that I am very passionate about the environment.  Globally and Locally.  Reduce, reuse, recycle!  Yep, thats me, a true hippy who owns a chainsaw because all the trees I’m planting are getting so darn big.

Ok, I’ll have another shot at being serious.  Thankfully the job is as much about climate “variability” as it is about climate change.  What that means is the Timorese are finding it hard to cope with the great variation in rainfall that they are experiencing already from year to year.  Rainfall is expected to increase by 10% over the next 40 years but Timorese already experience some years where the rain is 30% higher or lower than average.  How do they plan crops and last through hard times when it changes so much?  This is what my job is about.  Helping the Timorese from government levels up to the humble farmers who work hard in their fields.  I’ll be working as a scientist and doing some research as well as developing some posters and info sheets to spread around the country so that farmers will be more informed about their climate.  A part of this is bringing together all the weather data.  Some very nice automatic weather stations have been installed around the country but it seems the people responsible for collecting the data cant find enough money for transport to go out and collect it.  The pic at the top shows a weather station I inspected on the south coast.

  On a sadder note.  Last Sunday, a worried father came down to the beach looking for his 9 year old boy who’d gone for a swim and didn’t return home.  The father’s sad and wistful voice called out through the night for his son.  Many gathered down by the beach to search for him.  Its common to swim naked here and all his clothes were found on the sand.  The following few days they borrowed our boat with Gomez as the skipper but to no avail – he was not found.  They held a simple memorial service for him at sunset a few days ago.  Its not easy sometimes.

In memory of Simao who died at sea, 1/4/2012.

The Corn Harvest

    This week I went on a round trip of the eastern end of East Timor.  The first stop was Los Palos to inspect a corn crop. This crop was the result of that movie we showed last year with the Darwin men.  We swung a deal with a member of the local house church.  The Darwin guys put in money for a silo and its transport.  Thats the thing that looks like a tank in the picture with their old “silo” next to it which is a beat up, rusty 44 gallon drum.  Seeds of Life donated some of their top growing corn seed and the farmer grew the corn.  Seeds of Life also gave 2 tarps for drying the corn and I put in two tarps and a hand made, hand cranked “take the kernel off the cob” machine.  They planted out 1.4 Ha of corn and have done very well.  They began harvesting soon after I left.  Its great to see this project moving.  We hope to fill the 2000L silo which should take around 1.6 tonne of grain.  About 50kg of the best seed will be kept to put in another crop.  We plan to seal up the silo and wait till October/November for the grain price to go up from 60c/kg (now) to $1/kg.  They will repay us the cost of the silo plus interest so we can buy another silo for someone else and continue the project.  Eventually the Darwin guys could get their money back and have supplied many large silos to poor farmers in this country – what a very nice investment!
                                      



Pastor Samuel eventually got his 7000L tank on the very round tank stand base which worked perfectly.  Its all hooked up to the guttering.  Now they have heaps of water for their family, their church and the veggie patch.  Thankyou very much to the Palmerston Baptist Church, NT for donating the funds for this.  




     Down on the south coast we gave out more tarps from Seeds of Life and inspected more corn.  One job was assisting the young Losconi group in building a large shelter to dry their corn in.  Specifically, I was showing them how to install black builder’s plastic under the slab to stop dampness rising up.  I breathe a sigh of when I get back as the roads a pretty wild.  There are countless landslides and we passed three trucks that recently rolled off the edge resulting in a number of deaths.  The government sprinkles around a number of excavators through the mountains just to wait for the next landslide and push a way through.


The presidential election went very well and proved to be a peaceful event.  Jose Ramos Horta has been knocked out of the game, leaving two candidates – Taur Matan Ruak (former Defence Chief?) and Lu Olo (representing Fretilin) – to go onto to a second vote.  The poster encourages people to vote with the words “Respect, Law, Peace, Unity”.  We passed packed out buses and trucks taking voters home from their epic journey to vote.

I got a job!  Big surprise for us.  The position is Climate Change Advisor (stop laughing) for Seeds of Life within the Ministry of Agriculture.  We hope that we can continue to serve the people of East Timor in this new role.  It will involve scientific research in the field of climate and advising the Timorese on how to improve their crop yields and look after their land in a changing climate.  This will help us to pay off a few expected and unexpected debts and perhaps live a little (although Samuel thinks our life is quite well appointed, the rest of the family beg to differ). 
As we live by the sea, we experience the reality of occasionally losing a life to the great blue.  But this time it was not to be.  A young man who was caught out in the high seas in his rather too small dugout was thankfully found.  His little boat was towed in to a crowd of over 100 very worried locals.
  
We also had the priviledge of hosting a baptism with the Potter’s House church.  (sure to send a query up a spine or two back home).  A great bunch of people who are keen to follow Jesus.