I think that all blogs have a natural life-span. This blog’s life is over.

I designed it to be about the last days I spent in Dubai, and the first days in Dili. After seven weeks in Timor, I think my “first days” are finished.

But more than that, I have realized that I really just can’t write freely here. I am connected to a project, and am part of the NGO community. I don’t want to unwittingly cause problems for this project by something I write on the blog.

There are dozens of stories I didn’t write here, and that makes me sad.

I’ve enjoyed blogging. Maybe I’ll start another one someday.

Thanks for reading.

 Many apologies and much embarassment here…. It appears it was the local server blocking me (though I have yet to understand why…)

Have removed the post in order to minimize damage from unfair lashing at TT. Not that they don’t deserve it for other reasons!

Thanks to readers in Timor for pointing me in the right direction.

It’s been many a year since I’ve done a regular Sunday drive – since childhood, I guess. But we have a car, and a day off, and an open road.

Although we’re a bit cautious because of the security problems, we find that as soon as we get to the outskirts of Dili everyone is smiling and waving back at us. The day is cloudy, but the hills are a tartly bright green in three shades of velvet, the sea is the blue of a well-worn baby blanket, and the road winds through it all like a path through a madman’s garden.

I am gritting my teeth and clutching the door handle as soon as the road starts to climb. The roads here are almost never a full two lanes; vehicles negotiate the space in a slow-speed version of Chicken. There are huge potholes and sharp drop-offs at the edge where the rains have washed away the pavement. The road follows the curtain-like folds of the hillside, so most of the curves are very, very blind. The buses and mini-buses, overloaded with passengers clinging to the roofs, trundle along in surprising numbers. Because we drive on the left here, heading east means we are on the outside edge of the road with a sheer dropoff to oblivion – and of course there are no guard rails.

Tom drives slowly and he’s a very good driver, so I do manage to enjoy the views – though mostly when we pull over.

Mogadishu likes the views too.

He climbs on the rocks, admires the sea, and finds treasures on the beach.

Mogadishu makes friends wherever he goes. He waves at passing cars and buses and trucks, or poses prominently where they can see him. Without fail, the Timorese smile broadly or burst into laughter, and wave back. Even the teenage boys, who invest quite a bit of energy in looking tough and fierce, can’t help themselves.

The sight of me grinning and holding a little yellow dog is of course more evidence that foreigners are crazy, but Mogadishu is adorable all by himself.

We are on a quest for straw mats to cover the floor under the dining table. [They're not sold in Dili; the city folk use the plastic ones from China.] I’ve been told the mats can be found about 45 minutes out of Dili, and sure enough, we come to a village lined with stands where baskets and mats bob from poles.

Although we only can speak a few words of Tetum, the women selling the goods know how to say “five dollar” and “ten dollar.” The labor of the hand-woven baskets and mats is so apparent, and the women and children are so thin, we do not even consider bargaining on the price. We buy five mats, two large baskets for laundry, and one smaller one for kitchen miscellania. The women chatter, clearly trying to figure out what the total bill is; I hand them $50 and ask, Is it OK? They smile widely and say Thanks.

Then I ask if I can take photos, and the children clamber to show off their gorgeous smiles. The best part, of course, is showing them the photos on my LCD display of my digital camera. They squeal with delight and point at themselves, and giggle.

It’s the loveliest scene on the whole drive.

9:35 a.m.: There is a live chicken in my kitchen.
Regina has bought it, at our request, and will butcher it and bring the pieces to us. I didn’t think she’d bring it to me before then, though… so now I have the distressing thought of having to eat an animal tomorrow which is clucking softly in a box in my kitchen today.  

I get attached easily. Whenever a gecko flits into the house, I immediately greet it: “Hi gecko! What’s up?” There was a huge spider, the size of mouse, crouched in a corner near the office door last week, and I named it Pepito and spoke to it whenever I passed it. Most people have little sausage pillows that they stuff in front of the doors to keep out such creatures, but we don’t. I rather like animals of the tropics, even the insects.  

The other night there was a butterfly (or maybe just a colorful moth; I’m no biologist) sitting next to our stairway, right outside the front door. In the high wind, it just clung to the white post, swaying, as though it had been caught out after curfew and had nowhere else to go. Even when I approached it, even when I zoomed the supermacro lens just a few centimeters from it, the creature stayed put, as though waiting for me to take the photo.  

9:48 a.m.: While I am editing the photos of the butterfly,
Regina goes into the kitchen. I hear the chicken scratching and beating its wings and clucking as she takes it from the box. Then I hear a soft whack. Then a lot of wings flapping furiously and scratching frantically, and I think, Jesus, is she killing that chicken right here, in my apartment? Somehow I figured she’d take it outside to cut its head off. But I’m afraid to look, imagining the white tiles of the kitchen splattered across with blood from the headless chicken running around in it. I concentrate on the photos, trying to bring out the color and texture of the butterfly’s wings.  

9:55 a.m.:
Regina goes out to the porch and gets an empty box from the pile and takes it into the kitchen. I haven’t heard any more chicken sounds. I am still afraid to walk past the kitchen. 

Hypocrite that I am, I do not want to see the middle part – the stage where it goes from being a bird to being a pile of meat. It’s not like I don’t know how these things happen. I have reported on factory farming and assembly-line butchering, which is why I won’t eat veal and almost never eat beef when in the
US. But I find it hard to be vegetarian. I like pork and chicken, would find it a real trial to give up fish or shrimp, although I cook happily without them and many of my meals are meatless. 

10:08 a.m.:
Regina shows me the plucked corpse. The kitchen is perfectly clean. It’s kind of a shock to see this naked bird lying there, but it bears no resemblance to the feathered creature that was in the box a few minutes ago. How did she do that? She asks whether I want it cut into pieces, what parts I don’t want, whether she can take the scraps home, and I pantomime my answers. 

I go downstairs to the office to talk to the staff about the security situation, and a team member offers me a piece of deep-fried tofu. I eat it gratefully. It’s delicious.     

(Lest you think that I’m oblivious to what is going on in
East Timor, with all my pretty photos and prose, here’s a personal update….) 

The news update in my team meeting is tense. The president has declared a state of emergency and essentially imposed martial law. One candidate for the presidency has said that the election should be cancelled because of the security problems (though maybe he’s just afraid of losing, a staff member jokes). The Timorese soldiers are patrolling, doing random house checks, alongside some 1,500 UN troops and 1,300 Australian and New Zealand soldiers and an unknown number of additional outside forces that arrived this week. 

Our deputy director’s house was attacked by stone-throwing teenagers for no reason other than that the assailants had been thwarted when they tried to attack a rival’s house next door. One teammate, who’s Indonesian, had to move over the weekend after just a week in a new place, because there were gangs shooting outside his house.  Another teammate, American, had stones thrown at him while he was taking a friend home on his motorbike Friday night. The third team member, who’s Australian, is worried about whether we’ll cover her evacuation if she stays now, because all the other Australians are being evacuated today and tomorrow.  

We all think the Australian evacuation is a terrible overreaction, especially with several thousand police and soldiers bolstering the security from now to elections April 9. In Afghanistan, when the rocket attacks increased and the random grenades started, we tightened security and kept working. Here, people are jumpy, the UN mission is disorganized, and the rumors are running wild. We hear that the fugitive Alfredo has lined up hundreds of the sacked soldiers (known as the “petitioners”) who were the source of last year’s crisis, and that on his word they will burn down the city. We hear that criminals are setting traps to ambush cars: boards with nails on the road, or sending children to run out into traffic. When I tried to order pizza Sunday night from the one place in town that delivers, the young man at the other end of the line said in a shaky voice that they were closed because they’d been shot at. 

Meanwhile, we are still working on getting fire extinguishers and Internet for our office, which has taken longer than scheduled to set up (the reasons too many to list here). Tom is still trying to get the staff in the habit of keeping fuel stocked for the generator and keeping credits stocked on the phone line and the city power.   In the midst of this, I am relaxed.

It seems that the more extreme the situation grows, the more peaceful I feel. It reminds me of what happens when I’m very very angry: Everything slows down, and I speak One. Word. At. A. Time. I don’t recall actually learning to control my temper this way; it’s something that happened to me as I got older, and faced more extreme situations. It was a bodily reaction that synced with my acceptance of a risky life. Here, I see and hear the anxiety on my colleague’s faces and voices, and I reflexively want to make them slow down, too. I feel an immense patience with them and with the tension here. The bigger the problem gets, the further out my perspective goes, the longer view I have of the situation. It’s an instinctive counter-balance – as the seesaw falls heavily on the side of fear and anger, I am buoyed by a lightness and calm perspective. 

I tell my teammates that, although it may seem preposterous to make detailed plans for a nationwide voter survey in the midst of all this, we have to go on. That the situation could stabilize, and we have to be ready to take the opportunity to help. That our planning and our belief in the future can be an important influence on the Timorese. They fall silent. We walk through the lesson plan for Friday and talk out the logistics of conducting the survey. 

I send out waves of soothing energy in any way that I can.   I watch my neighbors carefully from the second-story porch of our apartment, which has a tree-sheltered view of the main street and the corner (as well as three escape routes). Our block has been untouched in the past violence in Dili, and our neighbor says it’s because the house of a “founding father” of independence lived and was killed there, so it’s a kind of sacred space. I’m dubious that the rouges who roam these streets know their nation’s history that well, but nonetheless something or someone is clearly protecting these houses.

More likely, I think, it’s respect for Avo Du, our 90-something resident caretaker, a shrunken laughing little man who has lived in this house all his life. He stands at the gate morning and evening, and he is fed and cared for by all the neighborhood. I love Avo Du and try to evoke his mirth whenever possible, which is quite easy since he seems to find the mere sight of me and Tom quite funny. He thinks it is absolutely hilarious that I drive a car, his shoulders shaking with laughter whenever he sees me behind the wheel, as though he is saying, “Monkeys have wings! Never thought I’d see the day!!” 

I take care to greet the neighbors, smile at them, wave, make jokes with the little girls walking home from school and give a thumbs-up to the teenage boys playing guitar on the wall.  

Smiling is important. I don’t care if I look stupid or naïve. I’m 47, I’ve traveled in more than 40 countries, and I’ve never been hurt or robbed or attacked. Seems dumb to change my policy now.  It is also strategic in a situation like this one. A sincere smile means “I am not a threat.” It is hard (though not impossible, I know) to make an enemy of someone who smiles and waves and greets you each day. As Tom says, “So what if they think I’m an idiot? Nobody’s going to bother to attack an idiot.” But when you stop smiling, neither side is sure. Neither side knows whether to trust, or whether the other is an enemy. When angry and mob mentality arise, it’s easier to lash out at the unsmiling stranger.  So I smile and wave at the people who know where I live. It is not insurance. But it’s an investment that costs nothing. And it helps, I think, to keep the calm. 

Ze’sopol Carlito Caminha/TiLPA
 

May your strength give us strength,

may your faith give us faith,

may your hope give us hope,

may your love give us love… - Bruce Springsteen 

It’s hard to say when this day actually began. I guess it was at 1:10 a.m., when I woke up, and Tom was awake, and my Bose headphones were still on my head but switched off so that the noise-canceling was not operating. So I could hear the generator quite plainly.

It was loud. Not loud the way that a small generator is, the ones that only put out 5 KV and look something like a stand-alone car engine. Those things rattle and roar and make noise in about 15 different ways. Our generator, which supposedly has capacity for the whole office and our apartment, is about the size of a washing machine and is the “quiet” model.

But this just means that, instead of roaring and rattling, it makes the steady whirring sound of an enormous fan, with a high-pitched overtone, something like an eighteen-wheeler semi truck or a 737 jet engine does when it is idling. So, although this generator does not rattle my bones, it penetrates my flesh like a flannel sheet with a steel wool underside, scraping on some cellular level, inescapably painful but with a deceptively smooth outer layer.  

Despair washed over me. I’m sensitive, it’s true, sensitive to all kinds of noise. The booming bass from a disco half a mile away can keep me awake – as it did in the countryside of
Sihanoukville, Cambodia, or countless other places where I have spent miserable nights stuffing various objects and padding in and around my ears to block the sound – always in vain, for the bass goes straight to my bone marrow.

But it’s just who I am. It’s my biochemistry, my blessing and my curse, to feel things so acutely. It’s the same physiology that makes me prone to depression, and that enables me to laugh loud enough to shake the windows, and that heightens my powers of observation in a way that helps me as a reporter and a photographer.  

People who say “Just ignore it” when I complain about noise elicit the same exasperation from me as those who say “Don’t be sad” to someone who is suicidally depressed. If you have never felt this way, you don’t get it. Only those few who have lived their entire lives with a depressive or with a Very Sensitive Person sometimes grasp the level of pain that we feel on a daily basis.  

Tom and I have just moved out of a hotel room, after an interminable month of trying to sleep under an air conditioner that was approximately as loud as a generator, except it was on top of us. I am so happy to be in an ordinary neighborhood, with the normal sounds of an underdeveloped country: roosters, straw brooms sweeping, children playing, motorbikes.

Our first night, we had city electricity all night, and it was lovely. There were a few unidentified bumps and scurrying sounds during the night, but nothing scary or sleep-shattering. The air conditioner, brand-new, was set to a comfortable level and, though audible, was smoothly quiet.  

Now I am staring into the dark, trying to imagine an entire year of sleepless nights with the roar of the generator. This is more terrifying and unbearable than the threat of mugging, rock-throwing, or even the house being attacked. I can cope with crime, can mentally adjust to the risks of major violence. But I can’t bear this kind of noise. It shatters me. 

Tom is not so bothered by noise, in general (he is sensitive in other ways) and in particular since he lost a good chunk of his hearing during his military service. But he is greatly bothered by heat, and when he controls the air conditioning it is set at a frigid 18 degrees Celsius. I prefer 25 and am happiest with no air conditioning at all – just a ceiling fan does me fine.  

I ponder what I could do. Move to
Bali and see Tom on the weekends?  

Then Tom says, “I’m going to put my headphones on for awhile.” Aha! Maybe the generator IS bothering him! My heart leaps with hope. Maybe I won’t have to move to
Bali. Maybe we can live with no electricity overnight. 

But then I think about the fish. We have bought a good refrigerator, and we’ve hired a housekeeper, in part so that she will go to the market once a week and buy a heap of fish and cut it up and freeze it, so that we can eat fish every day. But if the refrigerator is not on for half-days at a time, we can’t keep anything frozen – especially not fish. Despair again. Fresh fish is one of the compensations for living in this place.  

I imagine a year in which I eat nothing but pasta and canned ham. Well, at least ham is widely available here. But I’m going to be so comatose from lack of sleep that I won’t be able to cook or eat it. 

This train of thought is not going to help me make it through the night. I ask Tom for the Ipod and turn on the audio book, “Time Traveler’s Wife.” It distracts me enough that, when I turn on my side and put a pillow over my headphoned ears, after two hours I almost, almost, fall asleep.

But I can still hear the generator – even with the soothing voices of the actors in my ears. Normally when I listen to audio books, or when Tom reads aloud to me, I fall asleep in about 35 seconds. But exhausted as I am, the generator makes a wall of sound between me and restful oblivion. 

I get up a couple of times, to go to the bathroom, and to check to be sure that the city power has not turned back on. I’m puzzled because, when I look outside, our neighbors all have outdoor lights on, and I don’t hear any generators from them. How can this be? But our city power indicator lights are off, so I know we don’t have it. 

At 4:15 a.m., while I am still listening to Henry and Clare’s love tale, the generator stops. O, gracias Deo! I turn off the headphones and wait, anxiously. Will the guard turn it back on? Will Tom wake up and turn it on when the heat rises? It’ll probably be steaming hot in here within 10 minutes.  

But it isn’t. The temperature seems to level off at a reasonable place. And mercifully, I finally fall asleep.  

We get up a little after 6. I have a moment of panic when I realize that I can’t turn on the electric water kettle, but then remember that we got the gas tank set up for the stove yesterday, because I can boil water for coffee. We can’t take showers, though, because without the electric pump there is no water pressure. We take a bucket out to the Jacuzzi, which hasn’t been chlorinated yet, and dip it, soaking our heads.

Tom is amazingly cheerful, so I am trying to have a sense of humor, too. We edge around the subject of electricity and living through the night without it, but he agrees that it might work if we keep the place air-conditioned until 11 or so, then get up at dawn.  

My hair is filthy and I am so tired that I can’t even bear to eat. Somehow I find something to wear, despite the fact that all my white bras are either dirty or still at the hotel and so I have to wear a black bra, which shows through most of my lightweight clothes. I settle on a silk blouse, which shows every drop of sweat the moment it appears, and linen Capri pants, which seem to have shrunk because they were washed instead of dry-cleaned. I dredge up earrings to distract my co-workers from my dirty hair, which I’ve swept back into a wet braid. And I head downstairs to work. 

I greet my co-workers and notice that people are a bit quiet. Things are worse in the outlying neighborhoods, where most of them live – gangs fighting, criminals looting, people taking personal vengeance. I try to be gentle and smiling with them, knowing that their night may have been punctuated by shouting, stone-throwing or gunshots instead of the drone of a generator. So I conceal my horror when I discover that our translator is STILL working on a checklist that the trainers were supposed to start using yesterday.  

My teammates show up looking disheveled and sleepy, as usual, and we bump around trying to get their two groups of trainers going on analyzing news stories without a checklist. The generator is running again now, and I wonder when someone will go and figure out why we didn’t have city power when all our neighbors did. After the trainers get started, I pop in to tell Tom that we have no checklist translated and that I’m going to work upstairs in the apartment. 

Regina, the housekeeper, showed up at 8:20 with vegetables in hand and is now sweeping and washing the white tile floors. The broom and mop make soothing, shooshing sounds.  

She has bought what appear to be the only crappy tomatoes in all of Dili. Though large, they are green around the edges and scarred, whereas most tomatoes on the street are an intense red and glowing with health. The lettuce and green beans look good, and there’s some other green leafy veggies that I don’t recognize, but they’re tasty when I pull out a leaf to munch.
Regina bursts into a long explanation in Tetum and I look at her, utterly bewildered, and shake my head slowly. Then we both fall over laughing at the ridiculousness of our language barrier, clutching each other’s arms.  

I shouldn’t complain. I get a text message forwarded by Tom: “USAID staff are cleared to travel in to work although ongoing security concerns in neighborhoods south of

…” I can work at home. 

The carpenter we hired to build some furniture is supposed to deliver the wardrobe today, but I am dubious that it will really get here. People are afraid, businesses are closed or have shorter hours. Anyhow assembling a household seems a bit ludicrous when most people are worried about their houses being burned to the ground.  

Meanwhile, I have to get to work and plan for Friday’s session with the 10 Timorese trainers, who are going to go out next week and talk to hundreds of their fellow citizens to find out what’s on their minds in the run-up to the presidential election.  

I like my work. It’s a good distraction from the noise.

I do still miss Dubai, for sure. But, I have to admit, it’s good to live in a country where:

+When you walk down the street, people actually smile back at you and say “Bon dia, Senora.”

+A polo shirt, camp pants and sandals are acceptable business attire.

+It rains every day for about four months. But not a little piss like in the UAE, or an all-day drizzle like Seattle – it’s an afternoon downpour that soaks everything and makes it smell good.

+There is greenery on every single corner. It isn’t watered with expensively desalinated water, but with rainwater.

+You don’t have to pay extra for organic food. No one uses chemicals. Anything you buy on the street is organic. All the chickens are “free-range.”

+Fresh fish. Everywhere, every day.

+You can buy pork and alcohol in ANY store, without you or the store having a special license.

+The locally grown coffee is good enough for Starbucks and definitely good enough for me – and it costs $5 per 500 gr, instead of $7 for 250 gr.

+No one drives 160 kph, ever. The highest speed never exceeds 60 kph [that's about 40 mph for my American readers]. Taxi drivers average about 20 kph.

+You are never stuck in traffic for more than 15 seconds.

+It’s perfectly safe to take your eyes off the road long enough to have a good restful gaze at the sea. And almost anywhere you drive in Dili can be gotten to from the beach road.

+When I look out the window of our apartment, I see misty green hills and hear children laughing. My neighborhood is populated with people who have gorgeous smiles and young men who sit on the wall and play guitar.

+My neighborhood also has dogs, chickens, pigs and goats. My house has geckos. I adore geckos – not only because they eat insects but because they are impossibly flat.

+A host of amazing tropical insects just perch on flowers and wait to be photographed. [I will, one of these days.]

Ze’sopol Carlito Caminha/TiLPA
 

+The spiders and cockroaches are so big that they are like pets, and you can just chase them outside when they are in the way.

+Mangos seem to be in season every six weeks.

+There are amazing photographers like Carlito and Jonny, whose work is featured in this post [and more to come soon!].

UNPol is investigating this morning’s incident in which a Timorese national was fatally injured, and two others were injured, at an internally displaced persons’ camp near the Dili airport.

UNPol advises the area is secure after officers from the Malaysian, Pakistani and Portuguese Formed Police Units were immediately deployed to the area.

According to a public statement released this morning by the International
Security Forces, the ISF responded to a disturbance at the Airport IDP
camp and during that incident an ISF soldier was attacked and defended
himself by shooting the attacker, resulting in the death of one Timorese
national.

The Special Representative of the Secretary General Atul Khare has moved
to reassure the people of Dili that the security situation at the IDP camp is under control.

He thanked the people of Timor Leste for having maintained peace in Dili over the past 36 hours.

…Timor Post cited Special Representative to the Secretary General Khare as saying that UNPPOL had detained 148 people in relation to the latest security events in Dili and that he’s saddened with the damages to the UN cars and police officers.

The rock-throwing incidents left 7 UNPOL officers injured as they tried to provide law and order, said the Head of UNMIT stressing that the UN presence in Timor-Leste is here to help the people to find peace and stability.

Diario Nacional reported SRSG as saying all Timorese must condemn the violence perpetrated by some people against the UN whose role in the country is to provide peace and stability.

He appealed to people to refrain from violence

and maintain calm and to prepare for the elections.

The Head of UNMIT hopes the elections will be held in a free and fair environment and the results accepted by all the Timorese in order for Timor-Leste to proceed on to prosperity.

He believes the security situation will be resolved before the elections due to the efforts not only from the UN but from the government as well.

-From UN media monitoring report, Dili

The currency in East Timor is the US dollar. That’s what you pay with at stores, and that’s what you get out of the cash machine.

This despite the fact that there’s no strong American presence (they even still like us here), and there’s no significant American economic interests (the government owns the oil development in consortium with Australians).

Leaving aside whatever US security interests there may or may not be here…….

There are, however, scads of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) here, allegedly helping to build / rebuild the country. That’s what has distorted the economy, not to mention driving an entire sector built on alcohol.

As my friend Virginia says, “I have heard that East Timor is sloshing around with all manner of people …it must be fascinating …like being in a kind of human zoo of NGOs!” A zoo, indeed – a menagerie of foreigners who sometimes purr, sometimes bite, sometimes fly, sometimes pace, and sometimes just sit and wait to be fed.

It’s a mutual dependency. Even while receiving grants and loans and other forms of assistance, the government UNDERspends its budget by at least 20 percent. Literally, they do not know how to spend the money. Yet most Timorese don’t have clean water or electricity or access to health care.

Don’t get me wrong. Many foreigners are helpful. Take Timor Telecom, which is run by Portuguese. They are not supposed to have a monopoly, but they continue to operate one by denying access to any private competitors. A 256K DSL line here – like what we paid an outrageous $70 a month for in Dubai – costs $2,200 a month. No, that is not a typographical error. Two thousand, two hundred US dollars each and every month, for a pretty basic high-speed Internet service. I believe this may be the most expensive Internet in the world.

Meanwhile, an excellent salary working for a nongovermental foreign organization is $500 a month. A typical reporter or editor makes maybe $100 a month.

Gas is $1.04 per liter, which is more than $4 a gallon.

Typical meal in a casual open-air restaurant frequented by foreigners: $15 per person, with a drink. Typical meal in a rural Timorese restaurant, $1 or $2.

Typical weight of average Timorese woman: I’m guessing 35 to 40 kilos (75 or 85 pounds). Typical Timorese smile: More dazzling than Brangelina times 1000.

And one last bit of math: 1.5 kilometers from the Dili city limits is a lovely little beach, right next to the road. With not a soul relaxing on it, even on a Sunday.

You just have to get past the roadblock.

I can’t believe I live in a country where:

-Ash Wednesday is a public holiday.

-Dogs sleep for hours in the middle of the street.

-It’s perfectly acceptable to say to a woman in a job interview, “We heard that you’re pregnant. Are you? How far along are you? Will you work up until you deliver?”

-Flowers grow like weeds. In fact some of them are weeds. Anyhow, the most ordinary yard is like a botanical garden. [The header photo is a collage of common snapshots from our yard.]

-There’s lots of violence, and more than a few machetes, but no guns. The strongest gang graffiti is things like “Piss” and “Asshole” and “Black Spider” – twice.

-The word for “a lot” in Tetum, the local language, is “barak” which is the same as the Arabic root for “blessing.”

-When it rains, the foreigners run inside and the Timorese run outside. For Timorese, rain = time to swim, play on the beach, and go for a run in flip-flops or barefoot.

-The waitress says “I haven’t seen you in such a long time” when it’s Tuesday and you saw her on Friday. And she means it. And she’s right. It is a long time between Friday and Tuesday. At least in Dili.