8th April

The three week dental clinic visit by Aussie dentists is done & dusted. A full time dentist would have plenty of work. Ginny was helping type up some of the notes - most of the procedures were extractions - too late for fillings for most of them! Quite a few of the older people (by that I mean our age!) had no idea of their date of birth, some just knew the year but that's all. Shane the dentist said that although they are becoming more educated about brushing their teeth, as they become wealthier, they will likely eat more sugar like the western world and this will lead to more problems. The dentists have a good gig as they can come for a few weeks and walk in to a great set up, and be very effective in a short amount of time. Building and teaching are more long term operations!
A typical day building in Balibo: get to work at 8, wait about half an hour for local workers to turn up. Wait for hired concrete mixer to arrive - another hour or so. Spend half an hour getting heap of shit concrete mixer to start.
 Start pouring concrete about 10 o'clock in the morning. Mixer runs out of diesel so get told by local workers to go to Leo Atsabe (local shop where concrete mixer came from) to buy diesel. 10 minutes of language difficulties in Leo Atsabe leads to me believing that I need to go get the step-through and head down the road to find diesel. On picking up step-through I ask Mario where to buy "solar" (diesel) and he sends me to shop opposite Leo Atsabe. Whereupon I pay $5 for diesel that they say they will deliver. Upon returning to work site I find Leo Atsabe have delivered 5 liters of diesel. The diesel from the other shop never turns up. By the end of the day we have about half of the 12m x 5m slab poured. The next day it went a bit smoother except for having to buy another load of water as someone had pinched the water out of the tank overnight. Also spent an hour an a half angle grinding old bolts and rebolting mixer engine to frame.  This is not a whinge,  it's just how it is here things just operate differently.
Also as you can see from the photo below, Mario would prefer to use a pair of sunnies from the dental clinic when welding rather than the welding mask I bought for him.


Thursday 20thApril
We've just said goodbye to Heather,Bruce, Nellie & Henry who arrived in Dili on Monday 10th. We were incredibly excited to see them, we had been looking forward to their visit from the day we arrived practically! When things were a bit tough earlier we actually made a promise to ourselves that we would stick it out until they got here! It was a bit of a squeeze in the X Trail - their luggage was strapped to the roof and the two boys had to sit right in the back - at least they were inside the car, unlike a lot of locals who hang off the back or sides of buses &trucks! We had two nights in Balibo with them camped (literally) on our floor and the kids being the most exciting visitors to Balibo in recent history. We had a great day showing them the sights of Balibo followed by pizzas and beer at the hotel. It was excellent to see Balibo through their eyes and it was also really special for Charlie to be able to be a tour guide for them and feel proud having made it to this point!
We headed back to Dili to spend the night in the dirtiest, grottiest hotel ever before catching the ferry to Atauro. Poz saw the most enormous rat he had ever seen in the garden but luckily didn't tell me until the next day! After discovering the best coffee in Dili (especially onsidering all milk is UHT) we got on to the boat for the two hour ride to Atauro. Barry's Place on Atauro