Third Goal

Codey!, I am a member of the fourth group of Peace Corps volunteers in what I believe is our newest country Assignment, a small island country called East Timor. Until the year 1999 East Timor was under the occupation of Indonesia. During this year, wiht the Aid of the UN, they held a vote for independence which ended with the Indoensians cedeing freedom, but only after they had burned 80% of the buildings in the country. The fighting, and massacres, were quelled quelled by the UN and Peace Keepers from nearby Australia. UNATIL served as a temporary government for a few years until the UN pull out last July. Because of Oil Interests or Clintons involvement with the Timorese in an embassy stand off, or simply humanitarian reasons East Timor was moved to the top of the Peace Corps Lists for new countries. We sent pioneers soon after a UNITIL was settled and now have 52 volunteers in country.

Timor has just fewer than 1,000,000 people and according to a recent study the highest birth rate in the world. The temperature is tropical around the beaches but the highest mountain often has ice during the rainy season. The people of Timor speak Bahasa, Indonesian for Language, but their national dialect is ancient and called Tetun. Although everyone speaks a little tetun the tribes in Timor are leigion and there are thrity two distinct local languages.

The peace corps is four years old here. They have had some difficulty trying to get a good and stable staff to stay long enought to get the program off the ground. I have heard that there have been 13 country directors since the first years and even more APCDs. Our programs started with Government assistance and soon changed to a mixture of Community Development and Health Promotion.

Life comes in three different syles amongst the volunteers.

1. The beach communities are generally slow moving and make their living as subsistence farmers and fishermen. The beaches are beautiful and the water blue. The temperature and the sand fleas are beastly and malaria, Dengue, scorpions and jhardia are their constant companions.

2. The foho, mountain, volunteers find themselves in a temperate jungle atmosphere with subsitence farmers and tradesmen. Instead of specializing each family both farms and owns animals. In the mountains the living is easy but the trips two and fro can be dangerous and the Tribes in the mountains, Mumbai and Moccasai, are anecdotally less trusting then the tribes of the lowlands. So programs are difficult to start and trust is won only through perisistent hanging out and being one of the people.

3. The city dwellers. We just recently started putting Volunteers in the big cities of timor. They are sparsley populated, hot and clogged with the stink of burning trash and animals. The people, from long exposure to Malaes, foriegners, who gave them money or food often beg or overcharge based on race. The poverty, and suffereing, of Timor is mostly visible in the cities where slums and lean tos with too few toilets lean against the walls of nicer houses where the rich live. But in the favor of the cities there are several ambitious Timorese dedicated to making a better life for themselves and willing to work and learn to do so. They flock to the university and work in the NGO s that pepper the busier parts with ideas and information from all over the country. And working on the ministry leel at a time of such great change is exciting and a sociologists or social scientists dream-nightmare.

If you have read this far you must have an interest in East Timor or have found you are being placed here during our upcoming community development wave, TL 5. For more information google Tctheliar to find my blog. Or google peace corps blogs, east timor and check out either Jesse Shapiro, our water engineer, or Travis and Rebekah, coaches. Their blogs are probably more easily accesible as far as information where mine has some strong language, and is anecdotal in nature.

I hope that the keepers of this wonderful site will add East Timor to the country list. We are working hard enough to deserve it. and I will give more information as my time here progresses.

Belu Kolehi, Tc The Liar

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 31st, 2006 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Asia/South-East Asia/Timor-Leste . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.