When Tim Came to TL

We’ve just had the priveledge of meeting Tim.  He cam to visit some friends but made the fatal mistake of asking if there was anything he could do to help.  “What are your skills?” I ask. “Carpenter,” he says.  Beaudy, I think to myself.  “Know any languages?” I ask. “Indonesian,” he says.  Double beaudy. This guy’s not going to get off lightly.
Suddenly, Samuel goes into turbo mode – why the heck did this guy not give me forewarning?! 
Ok, to the story at hand.  We’ve been wanting for a carpenter to come over for a week and move the youth centre forward and so I sent Tim off with my tool box and the ute with a couple of friends to Los Palos.  He was able to give them a boost with electrical, hand railing, doors and windows.  I am very thankful.  Hopefully a few mates from Darwin will be here soon to almost knock the job off.

Tim and a collection of friends from Kenya and TL – try to figure out who’s who.
 
Tim got to show the guys in Los Palos how to do a variety of jobs.  Great job, mate!
 


Uli and the girls holding the fort at Los Palos while Pastor Samuel is in Dili.


Its harvest time now.  Here one of the young guys at Los Palos is checking out a new device for getting all the corn kernels off the cob ready for drying and storage in drums.  More on this job later.
As a reward, I took Tim out to my favourite destination in Atauro – you have to have a little courage to hop in a small boat and cross the sea.  But the rewards were awesome.  We got to see the usual pod of dolphins – I’ll have to name them soon (except there’s so many – you can be Bob & Bob & Bod, and you guys could be Duncan & Duncan & Duncan – sorry, back to the story)  Also got to swim with some pygmy whales I think.  It was some first filming with my new GoPro birthday pressy – thats right folks, you all get to see what I see now.  Enjoy the movie.

Ok, so life’s not entirely without its mishaps.  Perhaps we should have checked our motor before embarking on the voyage.
Atekru is a great village.  This time we were taken with the beautiful hedges of flowers.  I filmed a bit of diving through some tunnels.  Also spent some time following a local mate, Tobias, spear fishing – I like to think of it as underwater hunting, he hides, waits, stalks all under water.
There’s heaps of mammals in this sea.

We walked from Maker to Atekru.  Tim inspects a goat coral.  The flower hedges in Atekru touched our hearts.
Atekru is a great village.  This time we were taken with the beautiful hedges of flowers.  I filmed a bit of diving through some tunnels.  Also spent some time following a local mate, Tobias, spear fishing – I like to think of it as underwater hunting, he hides, waits, stalks all under water.
 
Local girls preparing beans from their harvest ready to store for the dry season.

Emmy’s very cool hut where we stayed.
Atekru is a great village.  This time we were taken with the beautiful hedges of flowers.  I filmed a bit of diving through some tunnels.  Also spent some time following a local mate, Tobias, spear fishing – I like to think of it as underwater hunting, he hides, waits, stalks all under water.

2013 Annual Report

We are doing well after a round of illnesses.  Cynthia is back from her medivac and working on a new diet to improve her health. 

Xakira is just starting to walk and getting very adventurous. We also recently bought a lovely gas oven, which we are all excited by. Israel has just got glasses and devours any books that get close to him.  What’s left of the books is often chewed up by Fudge the dog (Israel has a habit of leaving books everywhere). Samuel signed up on a new contract with Seeds of Life for 2 years with a new title as Cropping Systems Advisor.  This commits us to Timor Leste until January, 2016, at which time, Serenity would be 16 and staring down the barrel of senior high school!  Serenity is also the family fashionista and somehow convinced her dad to allow her to dye her hair weird colours. 

Samuel finally finished the annual report of our activities in 2013.  This is a great summary of some of our achievements in 2013.  Well, God’s achievements?  Depends if it was a good thing or not.  Anyway, check it out if you like.
Despite my great claims, I have not started building a training centre for Christian leaders.  Instead, together with WEC and others we have begun teaching a course for Christian youth leaders – which at present amounts to 5 students.  We hope it grows over time.

Christmas in Timor

We decided to have Christmas here in Timor Leste this year.  We hope to go to Oz in June to see the snow and catch up with rellies.  Unfortunately, this seems to have worked against us.  A bad case of diarrhoea went around.  We all got it but Cynthia fared the worst.  She struggles to keep weight on and is breast feeding Xakira as well.  She bravely fought the diarrhoea for about 6 weeks.  At 38.6kg and no sign of improvement we decided it was time to get serious.  A doctor confirmed this and ordered her out of the country on the same day.  Samuel, Cynthia and Xakira went to Royal Darwin Hospital where she stayed for 3 days – long enough to stabilise and diagnose it as cyclospora.  There’s still no culturing facility for microbes in Dili so its tough to diagnose unless you leave the country.  Thanks to Nick and his family in Darwin for caring for Xakira and her bewildered dad and the ADRA family in Dili for looking after Serenity and Israel.  Cynthia and Xakira are still recovering in NSW with her folks while Serenity and Israel are caring for their dad in Timor.
Samuel’s mum, Deborah, came over for Christmas in our hut by the beach.  We appreciated this and all the goodies she brought – thanks ma.  The more nobler gift was a corn grinding machine sourced in Byron Bay and donated by the Lismore CLC (oops … is this your latest name?).  Thanks so much.  We are hoping to use this to grind corn into flour to improve business opportunities for corn growers in Los Palos and supply flour to a malnutrition centre in Dili.  We hope to experiment with Moringa leaves which will be dried on the island and ground in with the corn.

Samuel drags mum out to a little water project – here the farmer has built a holding tank near the top of his garden.  Poly pipe flows from a mountain spring to fill it up.

The farmer’s wife gets a tap by the house for all her washing and water needs.  Mum suggests she shift the hut so the tap is inside.  The farmer’s wife just laughs.  Why would you do that?  Then your floor would get muddy.
Mum casting a technical eye over the farmer’s coffee mill.  Coffee cherries go into the hopper at left of machine.  He cranks the handle (in his hand), the beans come through the shoot and have their skins rasped off by a metal disc made from a 44 gallon drum.  The process requires water so its likely this will get shifted up closer to the house near the new tap.  Next time you have a cup of coffee, think of these mountain farmers – its just a tiny part of a very long process.

Mum shows a group in Liquica, Fini Transformation, how to fold paper cranes.

Sese makes a brief appearance at Fini Transformation’s graduation/Christmas party before heading back to England.
Pastor Samuel’s wife, Uli, has just given birth to a 3.3kg baby girl named Elsy just yesterday.  In this country they have some unfortunate practices such as pressing down on the mother’s belly to force out the baby and if that doesn’t work, cutting her opening.  This is sor of a standard practice.  I warned Pastor Samuel to not let them do this yesterday before the birth but they did both to Uli.  Pray for her recovery.
So I hope you all had a great Christmas and look forward to a challenging new year.  Set yourself a goal which stretches you – something that brings you closer to the person you aspire to be.
I shall keep promising to send you our annual report for 2013 shortly so you can see what we’ve been up to and where we are going.  Lets make this another sensational year full of weird and extraordinary activities.
The following is a few pics from Christmas in Timor

A manger set up for Christmas, Timor style, complete with …
buffalo…

camel…

and an angel.

Christmas shopping along main street of Dili – perhaps they should put caps on the reo sticking up?  This is a failed attempt to make a storm water drain (second time around).
Serenity and dad couldn’t pull off a roast chicken so we fried it instead – another failed attempt.  But Christmas is all about smiles and bon-bons isn’t it?

Time flies when you’re having fun

Heck, its a week before Christmas and I’ve barely thought about that tinsley event.  I must confess that my little-uns managed a successful winging and whining campaign that led to their noble anti-plastic father buying a plastic christmas tree! (once again, shame on me).  But here we are with a plastic Christmas tree lovingly decorated in purple tinsel and silver baubles flying in the face of every eco, moral and spiritual fibre of my body.
 
Serenity doing time at an old prison for whinging so much about not having a Christmas tree.
Back to less shameful topics…

I had a visit from an old friend, Marty, who came to drive the whole water filter thing forward.  He roped in his Timorese friend, Gaspar, to be involved in testing and hopefully developing a strategy for getting water filters successfully into people’s houses. 

Strangely, many Timorese in Dili have enough money and persuasion to buy filtered water for their houses.  They can actually filter their own drinking water using one of these ceramic filters.  Gaspar hopes to go to Luro to see how villagers have been using systems similar to these and what they think about it.  We think that Timorese will consider buying this product.  Gaspar may be able to set up a small business assembling filter systems and selling them.
Cynth has been working very hard helping the girls in the sewing room meet various orders before Chrissy.  One highlight was making a croc for the opening of new facilities at the Xanana Reading Room.  Xanana (TL Prime Minister) read us a crocodile story while a bunch of Timorese kids sat on cushions made by Belle Kria.  We also had the job of stretching a couple of his canvas paintings onto frames. 

Cynth and her confidence in stretching canvas
These were painted during his time in Cipinang prison in Indonesia.  (He was imprisoned for around 10 years?)  I was very nervously firing staples into Xanana’s canvas, but Cynthia was taking it all in her stride.

Back of painting:  ‘Cruel ? and life’ Xanana

Xanana, Cip(inang Prison), August, ‘94
One cool seed delivery was to Atauro.  Tobias got a job to distribute over a tonne of seed to 6 villages along the west coast of the island.  The little boat was a tad overloaded but the seas were calm. 

Loading seed into our boat in Dili.

Tobias gets the good seed to farmers on a rocky coast on the island just as the rains arrive.  (its packed in recycled water bottles).
They have very small cobs of corn and low yields.  In some villages they build a small house to store the corn with tin sheet wrapped around the posts to stop rats getting up and into the corn.  This becomes the family shed and stores grain, seed, fruit, legumes, timber and tools.




Corn cobs still in their husk, stored in the shed.

Seed and Jesus Comics to the island.

Going out with the kids in the late afternoon to catch dinner with a very long home made spear gun.
Timor Leste was once a Portuguese colony.  At Maubara there still remains an old prison that stopped operating in 1939.  Prisoners were sent here for crimes such as not paying taxes.  If you had no money (like most Timorese) you could kindly opt for doing forced labour which, if you disagreed could also land you in a place like this.

The cells were in the foundations, note the lower window, while the prison staff lived on top I suppose.

Soldiers barracks next to the prison.
  In 1925, a political prisoner, Manual Carrascalao was deported here from Portugal and tortured at the age of 24.  He ended up getting out, finding a wife, and became the manager of a successful farm up in the mountains behind this prison.  He did all sorts of cool things at this farm including coffee and vegetables and there is a fascinating round solid granite stone up there which I assume was for a flour mill.  This farm, called Fazenda Algarve, is hidden at the end of a rough road.  I found it in my search for old Portuguese weather stations because we have some old weather data from this site that is more complete than many other sites.  The farm still operates very well, is still owned by the Carrascalao family and is a testament to the skills of this entrepreneurial young man.

The old granite mill stone lying on the ground at Fazenda Algarve – fair chance Manuel had something to do with this time-less piece of rock.