Liquidoe School gets a big boost

After a long time of plugging along, the school final got a big boost thanks to the effort of 3 guys from the Gold Coast:  Rob, Mat and Pelay.  Rob is a carpenter, Mat a roofer and Pelay also works in construction.  They made a top team.  The job was to try to bring the school building up to lock-up stage in an effort to start using it.  They raised funds to pay for materials and loaded up a yellow dump truck to get up the mountain.  Its not far from Dili, maybe 30km, but it took them over 3 hours to do the journey.  That should help you understand the terrain.  As it was a single cab taking other Timorese, the guys had to sit up on top of sheets of reo laid over the top of the truck – we gave them a mattress to make this bit a little more comfortable.  One of the big bonuses of this team was that Rob speaks Indonesian which reduces the need for me to sort out as much stuff for them.  The guys were able to lay the slab for the 20x6m building, close in walls with mesh, put on doors, seal off windows and make a little loo.

  

Samuel hard at work on the left.  Rob with samuel’s battery drill – an old ryobi hot wired to a car battery (we were desperate).

We had a bit of an issue with some of the locals being angry about the work taking place.  I hope that this can be sorted out.  Please pray for Mateus, safety and the school.  The next plan was to get the school furnished.  After finishing up this work, I got a call from Jill in HIAM Health with a large load of school desks.  She set aside 130 chairs and tables, some filing cabinets, teachers desks and notice boards as well as stationary supplies.  These were trucked up a couple of days ago.   Just another one of God’s miracles – its like its a daily occurrence here.  He still amazes me.  Mateus says he has 125 kids now.

As an aside, I have been panning a reroof of the local Catholic Church in our village.  It was in desperate need of doing.  I have found that due to all the needs around the country that I often overlook my own village.  They are actually better off than many mountain folks so I tend to put them down the priority ladder.  Anyway, it came time to do something before the next wet.  We ordered the material and God ordered the skill.  I didn’t know that Rob’s mate, Mat was a professional roofer!  They came back from Liquidoe with a couple of days to spare and thats all it took to get a professional finish on the Church roof.  It looks sensational – Mat did a great job! 

We thank the guys for coming and being so generous and caring and the spiritual input they had into our lives and the lives of the Timorese.

West Atekru

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Recently, my good mate Rohan and I went on a trip to the island of Atauro off the north coast of Dili.  It was a place I had not been to before and was keen for a bit of adventure.  The good thing about Rohan is that he is very gullible and seems to be able to cope with any disaster that we can fall into.  The unfortunate thing about Rohan is that is name is a Tetun word which could be translated variously as “the left over bit at the end”.  So it became the butt of a few jokes.  We took our boat to get over to the island.  It was great to get a bit of use out of it myself rather than packing off other people.  Unfortunately, since the roll over, Tobias (the skipper) had not quite got the carby cleaned and the boat konked out close to the southern cliffs of the island.  It was a very strong current there which was going in the same direction we were going which was nice and later Ro was able to get the boat into a massive eddy by the cliffs when we thought we should slow down.  We sort of fixed the problem with the motor enough to pull into the next village where I got to swim some Bibles ashore – the Bibles faired well but I swallowed rather too much water in the effort.  Here the locals showed us a cave.  They were way too scared to go in.  Down the back of the cavern was a tiny entrance into another cavern where we found a bat colony and a truck load of bat poo which would make awesome fertiliser if only the locals could be brave enough to get it out.

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After Tobias put the carby back together we got around to Atekru which would be our base village where Emmy’s dad and mum live.  We arranged some canoes here and took off the next day for a paddle down the coast glad to leave the motor behind.  These are dugout canoes made from a log with some planks on the side to make it bigger.  It has outriggers on the side made of bamboo.  We brought a piece of cotton for sleeping which we could use to rig up a simple sail.  Atauro is a beautiful tropical island with lovely people.  We paddled past a village or two until we found a mostly deserted beach with a few rock caves to choose from to sleep in.  Some boys came out of the mountains and got talking to us.  They were surprised, I think, that we paddled there in small canoes as most foreigners they’d talked to here were Australian soldiers who came in helicopters out of the sky and landed in the field nearby.  They said that they would not offer them coconuts because the soldiers came quickly from Dili and had full bellies and they would soon return.  But they figured that Aussies who’d paddled there in a small canoe must surely be thirsty and therefore it was only fitting that they should be given a coconut.  Without further a-do, the youngest fellow was sent up the palm and dropped 4 coconuts.  It was true we were very thirsty but 4 coconuts was too much but they wouldn’t share in eating them so we saved them for the meal later.  It actually meant we had bowls to eat out of which we’d forgotten to bring.  We had time for snorkelling, walking and cliff climbing – well, we thought we had time.  The sun had other ideas and ran away before we could get off the cliffs leaving us doing the final descent by tree roots in darkness.  We returned to Atekru the next day with a stop in the bay to do an awesome snorkel (northern end of bay) along the drop off being pulled along by our canoe and its little sail.  That night I got to participate in a small youth conference where the local churches were wrapping up a week of youth events.  I had brought a bunch of scriptures for the occasion and handed them out to youth selected by the leaders – it was a bit auspicious, us having white skin and all. 

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The next day we made an attempt on the highest peak in the island.  The island is probably only 10km across maximum but had a mountain of 1000m (3300ft) and we were starting from the sea.  We didn’t have offers of guides to go with us as it was considered too ambitious a climb.  No worries, Ro and I are old hands with the 1:25000 topo map and a compass.  This time we had a GPS too and we tracked the climb which I might show you one day.  We got pretty scratched up and a little off track but some Timorese along the way soon found us, supplied us with coconuts (as we must have been thirsty  - which we were) and showed us some paths to get us back on track.  We made the summit about 2pm and stopped for lunch.  The descent was very steep and spectacularly rugged.  We dropped into a sharp ravine and followed the beautifully carved rocky creek down the mountain.  Soon the sun began to run away and we got out on a ridge to find some desperate farming activity in the dry, rugged conditions.  We passed a farmers shack that seemed to suggest severely stunted development especially given the bed inside was barely 4 foot long.  Of course, as tradition would have it, the last few hundred meters was done in the dark with a bit of help from the Timorese and we finally met up with Emmy and Tobias who had come around in the boat.  We slept there in Maker that night and took off for home early the next morning to recover from the adventure.  Thanks heaps for a mate like Ro to enjoy such a journey with.

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PS On return I met an experienced hiker in Dili who said he’d made 5 attempts on the summit and still hadn’t made it.  Perhaps we just got lucky.

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Family Visit

  We were blessed to have Graham, Lynelle and Arlene (Cynthia’s father, mother and sister) come to visit us recently for three weeks. This is the first time our family has visited us not including 2004 we when we first came to Timor with my sister Eliza. It was great to be able to share our lives with them so they could get a real feel for what our life is like rather than just sitting there reading some blog. Now they know how much Samuel is embellishing the adventure and how much we leave out.

Graham did grandpa things with the kids as well as help out with odd jobs and tasks around the house. One of these was to make an experimental seed sorting screen which meant a lot of hole drilling. The Timorese can use this to sort out corn seed that is too small and then package up the good quality seed for distribution and sales. Its another small step forward for this country – taking care of good seed in order to get good crops for the next year. Since Graham’s prototype we have employed a Timorese to make ten more which have been sold for distribution to Community Seed Producer Groups within Seeds of Life.

 

 

Lynelle did grandma things with the kids. She spent a lot of time in the garden and taught our Timorese girls and Samuel her special composting technique – her key concept seemed to be “a good cooking compost” and worked hard to get it warm. We are still turning it over. Lynelle also spent a lot of time in the kitchen preparing meals and experimenting with the new breadmaker that they brought over (woohoo).

 

Arlene did lots of cool aunty things with the kids. Arlene also has a flair for cooking, or is it ‘chef-ing’? She got the full Timorese experience being pretty sick a couple of times.

We took them on a tour to Los Palos and back so they could see the sights of Timor and some of our work with Pastor Samuel. This included a snorkel at the famous K41 and a night at Baucau. Here we discovered an old Portuguese ruin in some secluded bay which I’m sure someone else knows about but it was fun to find without being told it existed. We went on to Los Palos and talked corn and building projects and Church work. We also stopped in at a little village called Luro where Samuel has been asked by a small community to help them get water from a spring (envisage a puddle – but its all they have and hope to supply 20 houses from it). Samuel is measuring the flow by timing how long it takes to fill a 5L bucket and multiplying this out to find out how much water comes out each day.

Thankyou very much to Graham, Lynelle and Arlene for coming over and being a family to us and sharing our lives.

Photos in this group from top:  Arlene and Serenity inspect a marlin brought in by a small dugout canoe, Israel tempts the crocs at a lake near Liquica, Lynelle inspects baskets at Maubara, drying sheaves of rice cut by hand with a sickle, spiritual house at the eastern end of East Timor, Graham inspects the new youth accommodation in Los Palos, two beauties walk through the garden, checking out the corn mill, inspecting the new sewing room freshly painted.

How to Make a Biogas Digester

Do you ever have a ‘dream on the side’?  One of those things that you’d like to do but because there are other things to do you just let it cook away in the background and maybe it will never happen.  Well sometimes those dreams can come true.  I have wanted for a long time to help people in a developing country make biogas digesters.  Here in East Timor, the forests suffer from being chopped down for fire wood and the women suffer lung disease from a life time of cooking over an open fire.  Last weekend, I got a chance to assist in a workshop on making a biogas digester.  It was funded from a small Japanese NGO called TNCC to help ‘grass roots people’ (say that with a Japanese accent). 

Step 1: Dig a dirty big hole 2m deep and 2 m across.

Step 2: Lay a slab and some blocks in circle (circles are very sweet things)

Step 3: Put in an intake pipe (100mm PVC) for the manure to flow in.  Lay it straight with no bends and so you can ram a plunger down if there’s a blockage.

Step 4: Put in an outflow box with enough volume and height to create pressure to help the biogas flow to the kitchen.

Step 5: Build the intake box higher than the rest of the digester so the manure flows into the digester.  In this case, the intake box is built slightly down hill from a pig pen.  Pig manure should flow into the intake box and then into the digester.

Step 6:  Render the walls by throwing mortar mix at it and smoothing off.  The whole thing is then painted with a watered down cement paste (no sand, just cement and water, they like to make this a runny paste).

 

Step 7:  Lay the dome lid on the digester and install the gas tap.  We tried this using woven bamboo – great concept but it collapsed with the weight of the wet concrete so we did it again with bamboo upright supports underneath.  The manhole in the top comes from a Japanese design that seems to work.  We use a washing up tub as a mold and it gets sealed with wet clay.

 

I drill a 2mm hole in the jet of the gas burner because the digester usually has very low pressure.

Step 8:  After a week or two, get in and remove the form work and render and seal inside the lid area.

Step 9:  Do a water test to make sure that it does not leak either water out the bottom (which will dry out the manure slurry) or gas out the top.

Step 10:  Fill with manure slurry! (ratio 50% manure, 50% water)  Its best to have lots of cow manure and goat manure and a bit of pig manure and a little chook manure but I think chuck whatever in just try to do it regularly.

It actually takes a week or two for the oxygen inside the system to be used up in making CO2.  So don’t be disappointed if you first get gas that doesn’t light up.  Just let this gas out (while you’re trying to light it up).  After the oxygen is used up, the bacteria produces methane, CH4, as a waste product.  (Methanogenesis).

If it all blows up, then you didn’t get this from me.  :)

My good mate Rohan came to help run this project and I am very thankful for his willingness to come and lend his technical expertise to make this a reality.  It was part of a conference of 10 community groups coming together to learn how to build a digester so they could go back home and do it themselves.  It was important that the design was cheap and used materials and skills that were locally available.  Unfortunately for Rohan, his name is a useful Tetun word meaning something like the “leftovers at the end”. 

 

On the way home we got to inspect the caves built by the Japanese with forced labour from the Timorese during WWII.  They were used to store weapons  and apparently as a sort of prison.  Many jokes and references were made about the Japanese, Aussies and Timorese all working together on this biogas digester.  But I think it meant something to us all that we were here together, 60 years later, not to kill each other but to help each other.

Many thanks to Mr Takahashi and Shiro for organising the conference.

Trip to Los Palos

Over the next few weeks, Graham and Lynelle and Arlene (Cynthia’s rellies) are staying with us.  We just came back from our main trip through Baucau, Los Palos and Com with a mix of sight seeing, aid and mission work.  It was a great opportunity to see the country of East Timor.  We stayed overnight in Baucau which is well known here for its old Portuguese buildings that are still fairly unrepaired.  I made a quick sidetrip early in the morning of the second day to inspect a biogas project coming up and get the Timorese digging a hole.

Then we went on to the east and pulled in to a side road going up the mountains to survey a new water project.  It is a very small spring which flows at about 5L/min or 7000L/day.  They hope to pipe it about 750m with polypipe to a small cluster of houses from which about 20 households will collect water.

Up in Los Palos we got to check out the foundations for a youth accommodation centre that Pastor Samuel is building.  This may become a new pastor’s house for 12 months as a young Timorese pastor couple are just returning from training in Indonesia and will live with Samuel and Uli for a year to get some experience. 

We also met with Lino the corn farmer and inspected his corn storage, mill and field.  We made a screen to seive out small kernels for selling corn seed and showed him how to use it.

We were glad to be back home after being out on the road for 4 days.  Thank God for safe travel.

Back to Normal … ish

Whatever normal is – I think that is what we are going back to.  Things re calming down a lot.  We still take care and I’m reluctant to be travelling on the main road into Dili but things are certainly looking a lot better.  Thank God and a big thanks to all the security forces both local and international.  It has been encouraging to have a small disturbance come under control.  I think it gives hope to the nation that when things go wrong they don’t necessarily have to go really nasty.

We’ll have a lot of visitors over the next few weeks.  Nick is looking into starting a helicopter service with MAF and the Ministry of Health.  A linguistics lady is coming to see how she can learn Tetun and help here.  Cynthia’s rellies are coming which will be a big encouragement to us all.  And my good buddy, Rohan, is coming to help the Japanese start a biogas project. 

An update

We went home early from work yesterday around concerns of increased trouble in the streets.  We only heard one burst of gun fire last night which was encouraging.  Unfortunately, a youth was killed in Hera by police yesterday in circumstances that could be questionable.  His body has been brought to Dili in a demonstration hoping for some sort of justice.  Fretilin is blaming the disturbance on some senior government officials comments about CNRT existing before Fretilin back in the 70’s – this does not justify the damage of vehicles and burning of houses.  We hope the police will act in a restrained way and that people will calm down.  We’ll continue to lay low.  Normal activities, like buying groceries are low on the agenda.  For those who plan to come to East Timor in the next week or two – keep in touch.

here’s an average link from Sydney Morning Herald:

www.smh.com.au/world/fretilin-denies-responsibility-for-violence-20120716-226eg.html

on a seperate subject:  A gardener was digging the flower bed outside the Government Palace and found some human bones.  72 bodies later, and he’s still digging.  They dont yet know where the bodies came from – Indo occupation? WWII? – but they hope to bring in forensics from Australia to work it out.

Hmmm…need to end with something happy.  We stopped by this beautiful lake a few weeks ago.  Stunningly peaceful with some beautiful bird life.