Timor Times

We took wine this time (by ‘we’ I mean ‘my awesome friend brought and shared’). I may or may not have recited a Roald Dahl poem. Twice.

It sounds funnier when I admit we had wine, but in reality I am such a show pony I would totally recite for people when stone cold sober.

You may remember, I paid $544.75 to get the electricity fixed in my flat.

My neighlord wanted to buy my furniture when I left. I estimated it to be worth $360.

One of my neighbours (lovely, lovely neighbours) negotiated for my rent to be $100 for the 2 months and 10 days I’m left here, instead of $515.

I’m a little afraid to say it in case a giant anvil drops on my head, but FINALLY. A teeny tiny little break. Thankyou 2009. OK so I do not recoup the money for the electricity, but I was prepared to live with that. yayyyyyyyy

Before living in Canberra, population around 330,000 people, the largest place I had ever lived had a population of around 24,000 people – when uni was in session. I grew up in a small town (550 people), I went to high school in a bigger-but-still-small regional town (18,000 people at the time), and lived in Farmidale for university. Nobody is more comfortable with small-town atmosphere than me, ok?

And yet, Dili (approx. 100,000) is claustrophobically small. It is simply impossible to go anywhere without bumping into everybody you know. It can’t be just the malae population as I’m always seeing all the Timorese people I know too. Driving to interviews the other weekend, we were overtaken by the Vice Prime Minister (how do I know? Personalised Govie numberplates, baby), who we share a wing of the Palacio with. You go to the beach – doesn’t matter which beach – you will accidentally bump into friends who decided to go there completely separate of you at exactly the same time. I even have the somewhat disturbing problem where now when I walk to work people will randomly call out ‘Mana Katee!’ and I have *no idea* who they are but they definitely know *my* name...

I never talked about here how proud I was of the CEDAW delegation. Apparently a lot of people turned up to their hearing in New York, they were surprised. I’m not, Timor is a bit of a darling of the UN and it was their very first hearing, after all. The delegation crowed a bit, apparently nobody turned up to Tuvalu’s hearing. Poor old Tuvalu. Hit by climate change *and* nobody wants to give them money to prepare for international development reporting.

Anyway, they made it through, and the Concluding Comments are extremely useful, I think. I’m really pleased I got to be part of this process.

Because every single time I have since I got here, I have gotten sick, for the entire period of leave. I know, I know, you can get sick when you’re on leave because you relax and then your immune system falls in a heap. I think that since this has happened every time I take annual leave here and then also other times, I think it’s more likely that Dili is actually just a really unhealthy place to live. Open fires, open rubbish bins, poor nutrition, tropical diseases on top of all the other ones...