Firstly sorry no photos because am writing this on the iPad now as the youngest member of this party cracked the laptop screen last week, and figuring out how to make a Samsung phone talk to an iPad to get photos over is well beyond us all.
Charlie is heaps better just in the last couple of days which is a huge relief. He was pretty miserable being sick away from home and it was incredibly stressful having him sick in such an isolated place. So things are looking up. We moved into our house on Tuesday finally. Although it's very noisy - right now we can hear Timorese pop music (not recommended), motorbikes, pigs, people talking and roosters (they don't care what time of day it is) - on the upside having our own space is fantastic. Our house is connected to our landlord's, and his wife Ernestina gets up at about 4a.m to fry up all the pastries she sells in the Mercado. But it's ok because the roosters have already woken us up. We can hear them talking on the other side of the wall (there's no ceilings) and we presume they can hear us but it's all good as we can't understand a word the other is saying!
It's been a big couple of days in Balibomwith the unveiling of the plans for the convention centre Poz is going to project manage. There were tons of VIPs here, including Steve Bracks who is the patron of the Balibo House Trust, the Victorian minister for tourism, the Timorese minister for tourism, various other Timorese sefis (local government mayors) but the people we most enjoyed meeting were Terry Bracks and Rob Hudson who are members of the Balibo House Trust board and who, along with Ricardo Krauskopf in Melbourne have been our main contacts with all this. Meeting them and listening to all the speeches etc gave us more a sense of the history and the big picture we are involved with and what they are trying to achieve. We have been in survival mode a bit, but with Charlie's health improving, getting into our house and meeting all those people we have got a bit better perspective on why we are here. Although we did get a bit worried when everyone kept saying how brave we were. Brave, or stupid??? Or just plain crazy?!!
One of the people there for the ceremony was Professor Damien Kingsbury from Melbourne who is considered Australia's top expert on Indonesia and East Timor. He was incredibly interesting to talk to, he isn't just an academic but really gets into the field, so much so that he is black banned from Indonesia as they don't like what he writes about them. As in, after the vote for independence, the Indonesians, besides removing all windows and sheets of iron off houses then burning them, also basically kidnapped about 350 000 people by loading them into trucks at gunpoint and taking them over the border into Indonesia to try to hold them as hostages to retain some of the Timorese land.
He is coming back on Monday as he is leading the Australian observer team for the presidential election. So we are looking forward to seeing all that.
The most freaky thing at the ceremony which none of the Australian side knew was going to happen was the reading of the entrails of a rooster. They had a katuas who is a local elder there to do a traditional welcome - he had some betel nut leaves which he waved around and the next minute one of the hotel staff came in holding a rooster. We were inside at this stage as it had started to rain, and so the rooster was held down on the floor of the hotel lobby beside the katuas. A bit of trepidation set in at that point and then he got out this knife and while the poor rooster was being held down he stabbed it once in the side then waved some betel nut leaves on it and chanted, then 3 or 4 minutes later he stabbed it again in the same spot - IT WAS STILL ALIVE THE WHOLE TIME. Then the betel nut leaves again for another few minutes , then he sliced the back of it open and pulled out the entrails to read. Still it was alive and the squeal it made when he first stabbed it was not a noise I've ever heard from a chook.
This week the dental clinic at the CLC has also been open with two volunteer dentists from Australia. Tons of kids have turned up just independently with no parents in sight, waiting for however long it takes to see the dentist. It seems like it's a novelty they are keen to experience! The only problem is that if they need to do an extraction or something there are no parents in sight to give permission. Next week they are running an education program in local schools to encourage kids to brush their teeth regularly. The dental clinic is really impressive, with all the equipment and standard you'd expect to find in Australia. They deal with some cases they'd never find in Australia though, like scraping all the red betel nut residue off people's teeth (a really gross job apparently!) or finding an 8 year old kid with 5 abscesses in his mouth.
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