End of the Dry

We are coming to the end of the dry season in Timor-Leste. That is a busy time for people working in the field of agriculture. Seed for distribution needs to be packaged up, new seed needs to get into the hands of the right farmers, and new plans are made to improve productivity. I’ve recently looked back over the last three years of working with my friend Lino on improving his corn yield. The good news is that every year his yield has gone up. We estimate that in the 2010/11 season he harvested around 0.8 t/ha (tonnes per hectare). Then in 2011/12 he harvested 1 t/ha. In 2012/13 this went up by 30% to 1.3 t/ha. Last year, he was very happy with his harvest of 2 t/ha. He’s been trying a number of new things on his farm such as improved seed from Seeds of Life, increasing organic matter with a bean vine, planting the corn closer and using a little urea. Its hard to say which technique has led to the most increases in yield and also how much the weather has had an impact. We hope the improvements we’ve introduced have made a real difference but in the end I am thankful to God – it is God who makes things grow. As well as increasing the yield we are working on decreasing his labour. A great story from this is the corn shellers which take the kernels off the corn. I’ve recently been asked to order a 40ft container of these and some corn grinders to distribute to farmers (funded by IFAD). This brings the total to almost 6000 shellers – which means 6000 households that can shell the corn more easily! If you’ve tried to do this job you’d understand how excited we are.
This season Lino is ready to make some big changes. Two of his big challenges are all the weeds and the white grubs that seem to be eating the roots of his corn. Unfortunately, I am turning to chemicals to try to resolve this problem – roundup and furadan. I’ll be working with him to limit the impact of these chemicals to just the weeds and those who want to eat the corn but I can’t help feeling that my clean, green soul is slowly ebbing away. My rational head says that using roundup may result in less ploughing which means you trade diesel fuel for roundup. The careful use of the toxic furadan might offset the heavy use of chemicals on imported foods since there is higher local production. I think your head can go round and round on this stuff. In the end we’ll just try to be as careful as possible and hope that the chemicals are a temporary arrangement. We’ll also have a crack at a fancy seed planter and increasing the plant density which is still quite low at 2.2 plants per square metre. He’ll be trying about 1 quarter of his field with this new technique and we’ll get the results by around April next year.
A very cool little story: my neighbour Anen has finally repaid his home loan for his three units. This is a great achievement after 4 years of work to build then rent and manage three units for foreigners. Like a previous neighbour, Amena, Anen also got the opportunity to build a fourth investment house during this time as a spin-off from the first 3. He has demonstrated a beautiful principal that a poor person, given the opportunity of finances and guidance, can completely change his future prospects. He has been very faithful in making his repayments. During this time he’s also invested his earnings (he always collected half the rent) in renovating and expanding his own house, taking on teenage student borders, putting his children into good schools, improving his neighbour’s house who is a widow and helping his extended family in the mountains. The ripple effects from this one family can only be known by the good Lord. We’ll be discussing a new project for him next year.
Personally, I’m feeling a little dry so I hope that soon the dry season will end for me too.

Happy fish.


Nervous fish.

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.

Returning to Oz

This is our final week in East Timor for 2011. It was a pretty rough journey at the start. We thank God for looking after us and for building the house we now live and work in. We have had great opportunities to help people here in East Timor and have done lots of fun things.  Its been great to have a number of visitors and teams come over to help their neighbours. 
I included a random little video for your entertainment.  Dont get too excited though...

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The kids are REALLY looking forward to getting back to oz.  We have a few tropical diseases we’d like to knock off while we’re there.  We’ve been having a bit of a chess craze here and Israel is giving his dad a run for his money.  Serenity is growing up into a fine young lady and will be a bit sad to leave Taffy the cat and Buddy the dog behind.  
 
 
 
 
Some updates:
The sewing room Belle Kria has done its last run to the market.  Our truck wanted to put on its best performance for its final run – almost empty of fuel, no oil so the engine tried seizing up, and a main fuse broke a needed a bit of dodgey adjustment to get home.  I have decided to sell the old girl for $2500 (apologies to Tweed Salvos).  The market night was quiet but the girls made a few sales.
 

 
 
The building team is a substantial way through building the block wall for the Nazarene Church in Dili. 
 
A final report was made to Wycliffe Bible Translators regarding Bible distribution.  We will have distributed about 1200 of their scriptures by the end of the year and about 1200 New Testaments translated by the Catholic Church.  We also hope to coordinate a big Bible distribution trip with Mateus while we are away. He will take approximately 300 or so scriptures to deliver to churches in the Viqueque area. It will be about a 2 week journey.
Tobias is off on another trade run.  He made about $150 profit on his 2nd run (an improvement on the $40 profit from his 1st run).  He swapped a goat for some rice to the value of $50 and I sold it for $75 to some guys in our village planning to buy a wife.  They were hoping for a price of $600 but it turns out she’s a bit more exxy at $6000 plus 6 cows.  You gotta be careful who you date around here.  The value of a girl depends a lot on where she comes from.  Anyway, back to Tobias, we hope he returns safely this Wednesday with another load and we’ll talk about how he might continue while we are gone.
Mateus continues to build his school at Liquidoe.  The big news is that he finally took the school shirts up that were   donated from South Grafton Public School.  This was very exciting for them.  Instead of going to school in rags they wear a new shirt and really feel like its a proper program.  Thanks heaps to South Grafton Public School and the Grafton Community Church for this donation.
 
Sese is using funds we supplied to him (ultimately from nice folks in oz) to continue building his training centre.  He bought concrete blocks and is working hard with local volunteers to raise the walls.  This will be for a discipleship training centre for the new organisation he is heading up called “Fini Transformasaun”  or “Seeds of Change”.
 
We’ll supply funds for the water tank and corn seed silo tomorrow and arrange their transport to Los Palos while we’re in oz.  Thanks to donations from the Palmerston Crossroads Church in NT. 
 
Other stuff will be wound down while we are away.  We hope to return next January but have some serious issues with the Lismore housing project.  We need a miracle.  Anyone know a miracle worker?

The rain-is-a-coming, Oh, Yeah!

Samuel is out of town, and has asked me to do a bit of a blog update for him.  He plans to return tomorrow night and will try to add a new update over the weekend.  So here are a few highlights of the last week or so.
We have had 2 heavy downpours suggesting that the rainy season is beginning.  Our garden is full of bok choy. ( this means we eat lots of green leafy veges much to Israel and serenity’s disappointment :) )  We also have a number of tomato plants in various sizes, a few coming out in flowers, and some watermelon and cucumber seedlings.  We have been able to share some veges already, which is a lovely feeling isn’t it?
Our boat went on its first camping adventure.  Some friends hired it for 4 days planning a trip east along the coast.  The night before they left one of the friends pulled out ill, and Samuel asked if he could join them, so off they went.Serenity Israel and I stayed home (read “not exactly excited by the thought of seasickness and sleeping on sand”).  Mind you, we ended up joining them all for one night at the end of the trip.  We survived.
 
They found some lovely camping spots tucked away, some great snorkelling and beautiful views of the island!They saw dolphins, a whale, and later a group of wild monkeys playing on a hill.
Back home, the sewing room is plodding along.  We had Ange turn up again after 8 months maternity leave.  She finds her way from the other side of town each day – dedication.  She is the eldest daughter of one of our neighbours and has some great creativity.
Samuel also whipped up a set of lockers for motorbike helmets.  This is to be installed at the Seeds of Life office.  Building the frame wasn’t too stressful, but fitting 15 doors took some perseverance.               
Other things – Israel just finished a course of antibiotics, and serenity is battling a re-occurring earache.  We seem to get it under control with regular drops of a water/vinegar mix but then she goes swimming again and….anyway she is attempting not to swim for 2 weeks starting today.  Wish her luck…the water is perfect – flat, warm, shallow.
Oh and how can i forget?  We have been spoilt with some lovely whale watching – me and the kids have seen about 5 in 3 days from our dining room.  Yesterday a huge one was cruising west about 200m out.  We studied some identification details and are pretty convinced it was a blue whale, although it may have been a fin whale (similar to the blue whale but a bit smaller.)  Just awesome!

A bamboo fence

Since I am a bit of a hippy at heart, I am always trying to steer my construction toward environmentally sustainable practices.  Its not puritan by any means and you may one day even see me with a chainsaw in my hand.  In Los Palos, they have a pressing need for food.  Samuel and Uli, the Pastors of a youth church, take in as many people as they can feed which is not a lot on a meagre $70 per month allowance.  They have an excellent patch of land but if they try to grow vegies some hungry person or animal ends up eating it before they do.  This means the land lays fallow and unproductive.  The challenge was to build the cheapest and most achievable fence possible with what we had.  It also had to be strong enough and tall enough to keep out children and goats from the garden.  That way they could harvest their food and give it to those who really needed it.  So we … ok, I came up with a bamboo fence design – I’ll take the credit, that way if it doesn’t work, you know who to blame.
First we dug a trench down 20cm deep and 20cm wide.   





Then we fill it with cement and rock – ok the cement came from Indonesia but the limestone rock was onsite and the sand came from a local river.  Spot  the flying rock from Keith’s hand.

We shoved in some bamboo poles about 1.8m long into the trench about every 2m.  The Timorese know which poles are good for posts, in this case its ‘red bamboo’ (I know to the untrained eye they look green, you might have to use your imagination)  The bottles are an idea for protecting the top of the bamboo from filling with water. 


Then we split a different type of bamboo in half for the horizontal fence rails.  This is easier than you may think – if you have a good machete, and a good eye.  But once you’ve got the split going it tends to run along the grain and pop apart.
    
Then we cut more bamboo at 1.8m and split it up into strips about 4cm.  We nailed the pickets onto the rails with 5cm flat head nails and bent them over on the back.  Some pre-drilling goes down well. 
   
Then sections are carried to the poles to be screwed on with … wait for it … my little trade secret … roofing screws!  These screws bore their own hole into the bamboo without it splitting and hang on real tight – sensational!
Don’t tell anyone else about this.  I think bamboo is the next big thing that’s going to happen to Australia.  Just as soon as I finish mucking around in East Timor I’ll come and grow some bamboo in oz and make a mint off picket fences.
Ok, out of my instruction mode, we had a great time in Los Palos with the locals.  Uli and Cynthia had lots of long D&M’s and got to know each other real well.  It was a great soul time for them both (And I just thought they were sitting around not doing anything important?!)  We finally finished the last of the tiling a year after starting the building.  Credit must go to Sylvia for the long hours she put in grouting and cleaning.
 
We also finished building their shed walls, got the rafters and battens on the shed and provided funding for the iron which the Timorese will happily put on later. 
 
And all this in 3 days of action.  A big thanks to Alan Kent from Leongatha Salvation Army Corps and Sylvia, Keith and Lynise from Tweed Heads Salvation Army Corps who had the courage to come to East Timor and give of their time, talents and money to help make this a reality. 
It was a great time in Los Palos and a real boost to the youth – they’re finally seeing a bit of action.  This sort of work gives them hope and lifts their spirits.  They are the real heroes.
   
        They are the ones going around their community telling others about God and how great he is and what he has done for them.  There are many testimonies of how God how freed them from abuse, violence, disease and evil spirits.  There are many testimonies about how God meets their daily needs.  And I must testify too, to the way God has provided for us, watched over us and kept us safe.  I thank Him.