Odyssey

We have finally moved into our new place! Its like a dream and we have to keep checking to see if its really true. We have a place to wash our hands, water that flows even in blackouts, a place to set up an office and heaps more. Cynthia is over the moon!
We moved in on the Thursday and went to pick up a group on the Friday morning so there was no time for sitting back and enjoying the view. Israel was happy to find an unexpected 5 year old boy as a member of the group!  They have come over to see a child that one of them sponsor. They are a laugh-a-minute which I think makes up for their lack of good planning. But in a place like this, good planning often leads to disappointment … no, I’ll rephrase that – either good planning or no planning and you’ll probably end up with some frustrations and disappointments but you’re sure to have an, err, unexpected time here.
After two nights with us, we saw the group off to travel to some far flung mountains to find the orphanage.  Upon arrival they found that the girl ‘being sponsored’ had long gone and the orphanage didn’t really know where she was. After some anxious phone calls and waiting they finally were able to find and meet the young girl in Dili. She was living with her brother who was renting two rooms in a run down part of town. Eight people were living in these two rooms. Her lovely brother had tried to place her in a boarding school in Dili but did not have enough money. The sponsor money had never really seemed to reach the girl and she knew nothing about this Australian lady who had been caring for her for the last 18 months. This was a very emotional time for all of us.  I am very glad that this group of people had the heart and the courage to come all the way over and look for their sponsor child and find out what was really happening. 
While this team was here, Sylvia, from Tweed Heads Salvation Army, and her two children (Keith and Lynise) have come to East Timor. She came with a team last year and has come back for two weeks. So for a couple of nights we’ve had 14 people (including us) stay in this house. Serenity is loving have an Australian friend her age!
As the team arrived back earlier than planned, we decided to take the opportunity to deliver 44 gallon drums into the mountains. This is in conjunction with Drums on Farms East Timor. MAF avgas drums are donated to this organisation. Farmers in the mountains are able to use these drums to store their grain such as corn maize or rice. Its especially good for storing corn as the drums are airtight and the weevils in the corn will suffocate before damaging the corn.

Finishing touches

Kids and Cynth are sick again.  Today Serenity had a temperature of 39.4 deg C.  She’s seems pretty happy considering.  I have been just working on the new house – painting, tiling and installing windows.  It feels very selfish of me to work on something that my family will use.  I tried doing one wall with plasterboard for the first time ever in East Timor.  The shops are always changing and getting new supplies (things we may have had for 40 years in Australia are just arriving here in Timor).  The idea was to give the Timorese experience at a new building technique.  For them, building a wall is about using flattened bamboo if you are poor in the mountains or building in concrete blocks if you’re a little richer.  The idea of making a frame out of timber and lining it with some flat, flimsy product seems very weird.  They said the plasterboard looked great but wouldn’t last long in a Timorese house because as soon as someone got angry there’d be holes in the walls.  The wall was looking great to me until it came time to plaster the joins and I found that the quality of plaster was not quite up to speed and it seems almost impossible to get a standard smooth wall finish – basically it dries too fast, within 2-3 minutes its unworkable in the bucket and dries within 5 – 10 seconds on the wall.  Needless to say my Timorese friends had all sorts of professional opinions about how I could improve my technique. 
The whole design of this house is quite strange to the Timorese, and its probably quite different from something in a developed country. I suppose it came out of a strange head.  But its great to see them get experience at new things and improve their building techniques.  They are realising that if a wall is not built straight (plumb) then its hard to fit a door to it and the square tiles don’t quite look right.  They are learning to bring their tolerances down from a few centimetres to a few millimetres.
The picture on the right here shows Apeu varnishing some timber – it actually takes a little coaxing to get them to do their natural smile long enough to catch on camera, but its worth it!
On the left here, Apoli is using a grinder to cut security bars for the louvre windows – notice that I’ve given him Australian standard safety glasses nicely placed above the eyes.  You may laugh but I am very impressed by this guy’s safety – he has boots on, earplugs in, the guard on the grinder is roughly right and his technique is good.  In East Timor, you’ve got to look at how much they’ve progressed rather than pick on a snapshot in time.
We hope to move in to the new house next week, maybe Thursday as we have visitors arriving early Friday morning, and then another lot the following week and so on.    


Preparations are also in full swing for the 1 year anniversary of the death of my good friend, Maun Je.  Cows and pigs are being brought in.  The firewood to cook the feast has been stacked and drying for the last month.  The new temporary kitchen has been built.  The grave is receiving its finishing touches.  The boys are talking about how they need to finish the house very soon to give time for the final cultural preparations for this ceremony.  Its still about 6 weeks away.  I would like to spend time with Anen to learn just what its all about in terms of how much rice, money, cows and pigs goes from which family to which family.  It took a day for them to work out themselves and involves 24 families.  This culture is so important to them that one of our workers a few weeks ago started dating someone from the wrong family and was severely beaten because of it.  If he ended up marrying her – it would send this whole transfer of goods system into unworkable chaos.  He didn’t show for work for at least a week.  I really need to work this thing out as I think its fundamental to their economic poverty.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

First, something good – we received a shipment of donations from Australia!  Woohoo!  This is mainly a bunch of 7 sewing machines but also includes around 150 school uniform shirts from South Grafton Public School.  Thanks heaps to the school and also the Grafton Community Church who made it happen.  This actually inspired the whole thing.  We’ll tell you about the shirts later.  The sewing machines are a range of second hand jobs from around the Clarence valley in northern NSW (and a special one from Tweed Heads).  We found that the old singer sewing machines in Australia are far superior to the cheap copies we buy here in Timor which need consistent maintenance.  The shipment also included lots of old patterns to follow for the Timorese (your opshop fillers are gold here).  Also some school materials, books, a length of fibreglass, circular saw, battery drill charger and batteries (electrical spikes here killed the last one) and a tap for the kitchen sink (the one off our old farmhouse kitchen).  So we are very happy to receive your old garage shelf fillers over here.  I suppose its a shame its such a drama to shift it.  A big thanks to Cynthia’s folks who organised packing and to Rotary Australia for organising the shipping.

Machines and skirts; Cynth with the two sewers and cloth library books; patterns

Here’s where we got the shipment.  It came with loads of gear packed by Rotary into two 40 foot containers.  Darryl Mills in the thick of it with the blue hat has been a long time Rotary worker.  He’s head and shoulder’s above the small Timorese and sweating like a pig in the sizzling tropics.  You can either get fried in the sun or steam cooked in the metal containers.  There would be at least 20 NGO’s waiting for goods in a very haphazard arrangement.  Darryl is a very patient man.


Second, the bad – aaah thats too boring, lets skip straight to the ugly.
The ugly – its about Triloka where I was repairing the buildings for the agriculture organisation, Seeds of Life.  Lets just say that things got too ‘unstable’ and it was time I made an exit.  I was happy to keep plugging away at it but the powers to be made a decision to move me out.  I feel like a bit of a failure that I didn’t pull it off.  But I suppose I can live to fight another day which is a relief.  The good thing is, it leaves me with more time to work with the Timorese on the mission base.  This helps them to build their skills and we’re going to get our first arrivals on the 8th, July.  So it seems that God has it all under control.  It was funny how over the last couple of weeks I was taking some big tools off the building site like a shiny new wheelbarrow and my mattress.  These came home on the roof racks in two shifts mainly as cover-ups for my bamboo smuggling racket I’ve got going on (but that's  another story).

Me making a sweet get away with two body guards (awe…com’ on , I gotta make it sound a little dramatic)  On top is the wheel barrow tied on top of flattened bamboo wrapped in a tarp.  The idea is that the guys at the check point will be so interested in the wheel barrow they wont see the good stuff underneath.  It doubles as a good excuse to take the wheel barrow off the site without arousing too much suspicion.

Cave man

Cynthia has pretty much recovered from the measles. The damage to the eyes seemed to lead on to a severe eye infection. After some coaxing (I, Samuel am a very non-hospital goer) we went off to the doctor which was a good thing because one of my many little injuries was going septic on me and my hand was starting to swell. So now we’re both on antibiotics. But we shouldn’t be getting sick for a couple of months now because the very cool Portuguese doctor we see (SDA) will be out of the country till August.
Serenity and Israel showed the kids that group knot game.
Aside from caring for Cynth, keeping the house and doing the whole sick thing (I’ll spare you all the details just in case you think all we do is be sick, which actually seems to be what most of the people do here a lot of the time, I think its a ‘developing country’ thing) ...where was I... yes, aside from sickness I’ve basically been running two main jobs – the ag station renovation at Triloka and the mission base building in Dili. The cool thing about the work at Triloka is that I have made a new friend in the head builder. He’s a very sweet bloke the same age as I with 7 kids. When he was young he found a patch of boulders at the base of the limestone cliff in the city of Baucau. The city is built along this cliff which spews out the beautiful mineral water. Anyway, he made himself a flat patch by busting up some boulders and filling holes between bigger boulders with the rubble. And since he has lived there for 15 years he’s basically claimed it for himself – terra nullis rule, I suppose. You can claim a patch of land if no one else has. I’ve been staying with him on several occasions which is really sweet as they cook meals and I get to read stories to the kids and check out his caves. He’s asked if I’d give him $200 so he can get water put on so the little girls don’t have to carry water up the steep rocky slope. I talked to him about saving $20 a month for 10 months instead (I’m a cruel mean-hearted so and so aren’t I). His wife really cottoned onto this novel idea of saving up for a goal. It would be really healthy for them if they could do it this way although I do feel for them. I gave him a handful of tomato seeds which, if he grew them and sold the tomatoes, could pay for the water. I noticed that their ‘kitchen’ had no light. The picture shows the family with the kitchen behind them tucked in between two great limestone boulders.  One of the little daughters was holding a little bottle filled with kero and a wick out the top as a light for mum as she stirred the vegies over the fire. She was perched on an old empty car battery which tipped and she fell ... almost into the fire with the kero lamp, not a good look. Mum had been cooking this way for years. I walked (climbed?) down to the local shop and put together some electrical gear - $7.25 and 2 hours later she had a light in her kitchen, revolutionary! We are so rich in the west its embarrassing. I get a few bites from sleeping in their house. It was one of these bites that went septic on my hand. I will keep thinking about the water. Its not the money that’s the issue, its how to help them in an appropriate and meaningful way that will help them to grow into the future by guiding their priorities and choices.
This pic shows a cool Timorese house in Triloka.  The bottom half of the wall is limestone rock stuck together with red clay soil.  Above this is rusty 44 gallon drums beaten flat.  The roof is a thatch grass – the light brown section to the right has more recently been replaced.  For the ridge cap, they have lashed out and put on some roofing iron sheets held down with a couple of lengths of bamboo.

Measles

The World Health Organisation says that 700,000 children die anually of measles.  Many suffer eye complications and become blind due to poor nutrition and the compounding affects of diarrhoea often associated with measles.  Vitamin A drops can be given to help repair the eyes if given in time as well as a dose of tetracycline.  I thought measles was just one of those uncomfortable sicknesses you didn’t want to get.  You got spots and took a few days off school.  Apparently though its a big killer and its why in Australia they try to immunise babies and children from the disease.  Cynthia didn’t get immunised.  NSW Health issued a warning in March about the risk of measles especially from those who’ve recently returned from an overseas trip.  It seems as though this disease is ripping through south-east Asia at least.  For us, in Beto Tasi, it means many children and young people brought down with a terrible suffering sickness – high fever in the hot tropics, vomiting, diarrhoea, intense coughing, increased heart rate for extended periods and very sore eyes.  Basically, its something you just don’t want to get.  We thought we were safe as we watched people dropping down around us.  But 10 days ago it hit Cynthia.  She doesn’t have the biggest sort of body so she doesn’t have a lot of reserves.  In our family, she seems to get by with not too much sickness but this time she was hit hard.  She also has a hole in one of the valves in her heart.  For these reasons sometimes I feel bad about bringing her into a world like this.  We took a couple of the sick to a clinic in town but there was not much to be done.  Some of them made an arduous journey way up into the mountains to seek medicine from what you might call a witch doctor.  For Cynthia, it was a case of taking panadol and laying in a dark room with the fan on (while the electricity works).  Unfortunately the electricity was bad enough during this time that the villagers resurrected the old hand pump to get water.  The usual way of getting water here is from a bore with an electric pump.  We have an inverter and some car batteries for back up power for times like this to drive a fan. But of course, it was during this time that I was lending our inverter to a local micro-finance organisation to test as a battery backup to drive a computer to manage small loans for the poor.  Ooops.  Needless to say we are desperately looking forward to moving down to the new house.  We plan to install solar panels and batteries and an inverter (which I wont lend, I promise).  It also catches sea breezes, which you might think is a luxury, we see it more along the lines of an asset especially valuable in times of sickness.  Cynthia is recovering but her main complaint is very sore eyes.  The room must be almost completely blacked out and she is going a little crazy in the mind with nothing to do as she can’t use her eyes for reading or using the computer and she certainly cant go out of the house.  She’s a bit scared but I think she’s going to be ok.  I have issues with positive thinking which I am also trying to deal with. 
On a lighter note, I took the kids to a party with the theme of wheels.  All the kids had bikes to ride and last night we were oiling chains and pumping tyres in preparation for the big day.  Serenity made a cape in the sewing room from scraps as a present for the birthday boy.  Israel loved the challenge of riding around a big concrete circle with about thirty other little kids all teetering on the edge of having a mass pile up.  Dad on the sidelines was pretty worried but they did him proud and came away unscathed. 

Chugging Along

Click on the movie to download while you read if you want to.  Its 8Mb, a walk through our new home nearlyish complete.

We are all fairly well.  Israel is a bit sick.  It probably doesn’t help that he tears around outside most of the day in the dust and poo from various different living organisms.  Samuel has been away for another 4 days trying to run some semblance of a building program.  His latest pull-your-hair-out drama is the windows and doors.  It was eventually agreed that all the windows and doors need replacing.  He arranged a subcontract through the building contractor to get them professionally made.  Both the contractor who is a Timorese architect trained in London and the head carpenter came on site to measure up the doors and windows.  Now they are being delivered on site only to find that many of them are 10-15cm out in width and length.  This turns a window installation job of 2 hours into 8 hours in this country.  Its just a major hassle that wouldn’t have to happen if only they could use a tape measure.  I will learn my lesson one day I suppose.
Friday, 20th, May, was the 9th anniversary of “The Restoration of Independence of Timor Leste”.  They put in ‘restoration’ to make the point that they got independence for a few months back in ‘75 only to lose it again to the Indonesians.
The Mission Base (which is about to undergo a name change) is chugging along without much involvement from Samuel.  We just check it out once a week, suck in our breath at the interesting building techniques, and go “cant wait to move in”.  Check out the movie if you can wait for the download. 




We still distribute some Bibles.  We are waiting for a big wig in the Nazarene Church to come and talk about the design of their complex.   There’s a bit of a design here.  Its Samuel’s first go at using a real CAD program. 
Sese, the evangelist, got a motorbike and is able to get around and visit different places and villages.  He also has connections to the Catholic Bible publishing group which can give me a way in to get Bibles.
We gave Mateus a small loan to buy materials to help build a school in the mountains and this is moving along.
We are involved in other odd jobs whenever people can nail us like advice for a microfinance org on solar and battery backup power systems so remote workers can crunch numbers using excel on a laptop and print forms for village applicants.

Murderers and Thieves

We are happy to report that we are all well.  We have an announcement to make about an increase in the size of our family.  I might as well make it official – much to my chagrin – we have a cat.  Not that I dont like cats and all.  Its just that I think they belong in Egypt with all those mummies.  But one must have a positive attitude on things so I will admit that it does do the cute thing … sometimes.  It has pooed on me though which I will count against it and the verdict is still pending as to whether it will prove a worthy member of the family and knock off a few rats.  Not that I dont like rats and all.  Its just that I think that they belong … well somewhere else.  We humans are a nasty lot.  But the cat does keep Cynthia and the kids very happy so I will be content with that.
Much of my time through the week has been spent in a place called Baucau putting a new roof on an agricultural station in a village called Triloka.  Baucau itself is the second biggest ‘city’ in the country and has some beautiful old buildings built in Portuguese times.  Many of the Portuguese used to live here as the climate was milder.  It is built on the side of limestone cliffs and is oozing with spring water everywhere.  There is so much water in this place it bubbles up out of potholes in the streets.  The roof replacement has been difficult.  Some of the men I work with have killed more men with machetes than I care to think about.  We were up on the roof the other day waiting for something to be passed up and one of the men tells me about the torturing he went through in the past – during the times of Indonesian occupation.  Indonesian rule spread from the west to the east as they tried to stamp out the resistance and catch the rebels.  Some of the Timorese sided with the Indonesians and would turn in their brothers and kill them for a fee - $200 a month.  It doesn’t seem much, but it would have been a pretty good wage back in the 80’s and 90’s.  Anyway, that survival spirit still lives on and I find myself in a bit of a diplomatic challenge as they nicely explain that there’s going to be trouble if I don’t give work to so and so.  Add to that the thieves who seemed to be able to steal building materials before they touched the ground.  Roofing never seemed so hard.  Throw in a flat tyre, landslips, barely standing bridges, more rats and a broken fan belt out in woop woop and you’ve probably got a pretty good picture of the last couple of weeks.  Its work though so I cant complain I suppose.
The mission base/our home is still coming along and roof timbers have been half installed.  We are designing a complex for the Dili Nazarene church which is pretty exciting.  We are giving some support to Mateus to build a school in the mountains.  We are also being there for a young man called Sese who has a vision for discipleship groups across the country.  
The Sewing room is still chugging along.  Sinta has another order of 18 cloth books for the library in Gleno.  Mending jobs keep flowing in so she has been a bit busy.  A week ago we tried to employ a second trained woman (Sintas friend) however our neighbour kindly suggested it would not be a wise idea to employ someone from another area.  Apparently it has to be family, or someone from this small village/suburb.  Sinta could train someone but it means she cant be working at the same time. And at the moment we have just been too busy to spare her to train.  Still trying to work out how to move forward.  We are waiting with bated breath for the arrival of a crate of vintage machines and fabric etc.