Timor Times

Fuck I’m bored. Not bored with work. Work is never boring (except for all the weird annoyances that I will never get used to, but that’s ok.) No, I’m bored with all the things I try to do to fill up the hours and hours and hours of time I have at home. Yes I know if I were back home I’d fill my social calendar to the hilt and bemoan my lack of time. That’s the way I *like* my life, people, I’m a social butterfly. Not a loner.

Anyway.

I’m bored of dvds (let’s be honest, I’m not really one for watching dvds on my own – I like to treat it as a social activity, asking my friends what’s going on, offering the little people in the tv my advice).

I’m bored of listening to the radio.

I’m bored of solitaire, mah jong, spider solitaire and bubble breaker.

I’m bored of my thesis.

I’m bored of not being able to go out ever.

I’m bored of battling the mouse in my room.

I’m bored of eating horrible food and not much of it.

I’m bored of making plans (think of a life area and I’ve made plans...)

I’m bored of having limited exercise options.

I’m even bored of reading, to an extent. Yes. I am bored of reading. Me.

I’m not bored of being hot all the time.

I’m not bored of taking photos of cute kids; or random things.

You know that episode of the Simpsons, where that country singer Lurleen falls in love with Homer, and she lives in the trailer park, and it has a sign out front for NUMBER OF DAYS SINCE A TORNADO? And throughout the episode the sign variously has the numbers 9, 2 and 0 hung on it?

I feel like the Uma Kiik needs a big sign out front: NUMBER OF DAYS SINCE A BLACKOUT:2. Seriously, this is BIG, people! This is a milestone! A milestone that will probably not be repeated again, so it should be marked, dammit!

We did four interviews in a row on Saturday morning and finished around 2pm, and decided to go back to Dili that night instead of staying another afternoon. And I ... was... wrecked. I was wrecked all day Sunday as well. I couldn’t even think. Luckily I ended up at the beach with a new friend, thank God for the beach and distractions eh?

I’ve kind of adopted an attitude of not worrying about a single obstacle, because no matter what I attempt to do over here, there will always be at least ten obstacles to whatever I want to do that are completely unforeseen and I never would have imagined them. So you might get to do what you wanted, and you might not, and if the answer is ‘not’ it probably involved the combined forces of somebody’s contrary mood, somebody else’s bizarre sudden personality change, the sudden and inexplicable deadibones-ness of the internet, and two goats in the wrong place at the wrong time. Friday Cleaning Day, people’s fondness for two-hour lunches and shop owners that close their shops at really weird times (like 10am or 2pm) also feature a lot.

I decided to write this paragraph as a separate blog entry because I thought these people deserved it. Doing the interviews, while it was hard work (not just for me but for Herminio, interpreting, the awesome Gender Focal Point and District Administrator, and everyone who was interviewed), was so rewarding.

It wasn’t just because the interviews went well, although that is fabulous. It was actually extremely humbling to get to talk to older people of these little communities, because they have all lived through Portuguese and Indonesian times. Two of the older women’s husbands were killed ‘in the Indonesian times’, they said, and one of them also had a son killed during these times. ‘During Indonesian times’ is code for ‘by the Indonesian military’, of course. A small part of my research is on the differences between Portuguese times, Indonesian times and now in terms of the cultural practice I’m studying, and I so appreciated that these women could tell me this part of their story.