Lazy Timorese / Crazy Malae

I foreshadowed this a little when I mentioned in an entry above that my Timorese colleagues didn’t want to walk the five minutes back to work from lunch, they preferred to wait half an hour for a work vehicle to come pick them up. What am I trying to illustrate by telling you about this again? That Timorese people hate to walk. ANYWHERE.

I went for a lovely walk up a little mountain for three of the mornings I was in Same, and every morning I got looks of incredulousness. Walk, mana? Up the mountain? On your own? Why? Will you be alright?

Of course, I suspect part of the ‘will you be alright’ was to do with the bad spirits that lurk up that particular mountain, but it was definitely also a question about a person’s ability to walk more than 20 metres in any given direction. They just don’t get the idea of walking for exercise or, God forbid, enjoyment. If the car can take you that 20 metres, then, by God, in the car it is!

Then again, I can’t see the point in the daily, endless sitting under trees either, so I guess we’re mutually inscrutable.