We gathered (I reckon
about 300) at 05:30 on April 25th and the Dili Choir sang four
national anthems a Capella: Timor Leste, New Zealand, Australia and Turkey.
Tony’s Turkish (Tony is taking a break and his brother is running things) supplied some delicious Turkish breads for
afterwards. There weren’t many programs as we were meant to print off our own.
Someone had thought of providing candles inside paper cups and that worked
really nicely. If ONLY the poppies had been delivered well in advance, we could
have been wearing them for a few days beforehand, rather than mere minutes. The
choir of expats sang each anthem very nicely and that meant that the poor
singing performance from the audience didn’t matter that much. A special
commendation for the choir’s rendition of the Turkish anthem (written on the
program in phonetics). Afterwards 'One More Bar' appeared to have forgotten that
they were going to provide a venue AND drinks + food. Sooooo, nearly everyone
shoved off to Castaway for breakfast instead.
My shower water smells a bit ‘off’ and I thought it was due
to the water table being contaminated by ‘other water’. Well, I‘ve heard that
it might be more to do with geothermal and so that might explain why the odour
has more in common with NZ’s Rotorua area than waste water. I hope so, but then
I haven’t suffered any ill effects.
Monday 22nd - Wednesday 24th was another IT trip,
this time to the Covalima area in the south west. We visited Liquica, Atabae
and Maliana on the first day. I stayed at a reasonably nice place in Maliana,
just 1km north of the main market. In the morning I had breakfast with a rep
from Timor Oil and Gas. He was scouting accommodation for what sounded like a
team building outing for over 100 staff. I took the opportunity to ask about
how the power station at Betano was going to be powered. Well, apparently a
pipeline will be built between Hera and Betano – right across the island with
all its hills. Hmmm. There are a few gaps to fill in as I think that those
5000l tankers are running all day from Pertamina to Hera, just to keep that site
running. Soooo, why have a pipeline unless
the fuel was going to run from the south to the north? Begs the question on how
the fuel gets to Betano, as there isn’t a wharf yet and the station looks as
though it will be finished this year. I’m sure someone will enlighten me with
the info.
We traveled the reverse way (see Feb trip) from Maliana down to
Zumalai. I was astonished to see a bus coming the other way with ‘Suai –
Maliana’ above the windscreen. Another look at the large washout showed I was a
bit dramatic in my earlier report as to how wide it is. You still wouldn’t get
me on any bus or truck taking that route.
The work in Suai went well and I showed everyone how to scan
in documents and use the power conditioner + UPS correctly. The premises are
being upgraded so part of the outside wall was missing on one half of the
building. Accommodation was initially at a place 200m away & they wanted
$20 for a bed with half a fan hanging off the wall, no furniture, apart from
the bed and a bathroom that didn’t have a water supply. Some surprise when I
walked out. Rapid conversation got me the room over the passage way with an
‘ensuite’ larger than the bedroom. Pipe plus tap, instead of a shower head, was
the shower. Fan was connected to same circuit as the ceiling light, so
lights-out meant no fan. I groaned and draped a shirt over my face and slept
with the light on.
Home trip was via Ainaro, so another new place which I had
first heard about in 2005 from a fellow Kiwi that had been there in 1999 for
the election. Had lunch at warung and was suddenly accosted, in a very friendly
way, by a man I hadn’t seen since we worked at Ministerio de Saude in 2007.
Alvaro was having lunch there with his wife and child. We hope to catch up
again in Dili some time.
Wednesday 1st was a holiday. I had a piece of
lemon + coconut cake at Beachside and it was delicious. In the evening a
friend, Robyn, coached me through making the same cake! It took a long time to get out the juice using just a fork, peeler and a knife. The 'zesting' bit also
took a long time, but the results were even better than the morning cake. I
think I’ll have another go at this…
Finally, the little bridge near the President’s Palace has
been successfully widened. There are some teething issues with how traffic will
take to all the extra space, effectively two lanes either way, but I’m sure
everyone will adapt. An extra ‘baily’ bridge was erected, just 50m to the south, a
few weeks back and that is taking some of the traffic loading away. I get the
impression that changes are just 'made' and then we all have to wait & see how good the
results are.
Even after rain, there is dust in the air again within hours.
Very evident at night when every mote swirls around in the light beams. Maybe
Dili should be called the ‘big dust’, instead of the ‘big smoke’
Unlike last Saturday, Saturday 27th was another busy one
with Eddie and I going up and down twice. The 2nd time was for the annual
ANZAC Hash run to the top of the hill – starting from the church west of Dare.
It was heavy going and I was glad I had my off-road running shoes that didn’t
slip. I still fell over and grazed my knee coming down from the top, due to
being rather tired.
A good bit of advice in the tropics is to drink plenty of
water during the day, every day. I haven’t been doing enough of that and the
consequence was 3 hours of discomfort one night. Some stones are by the side of
the road and are a problem for a short period of time. Other stones are tiny
and a right b#####d until they go on their merry way. Lesson learnt for the 2nd
time . My next work day was exhausting for some reason, maybe due
to lost zzzzzz.
Bike #3 still needs a carrier + a few other items and I have
found someone to bring them back, via Brisbane. Getting anything bigger than a
postcard delivered by mail to Dili is not guaranteed; thus the frequent
requests of people visiting other countries. In January I bought a book from www.bookdepository.co.uk called ‘Mathematics
and the Imagination’, but it has never arrived, for me to collect anyway. I hope some
local person, associated with the postal service, is enjoying the content
including how to derive ‘Pi’ from a random series of events (ask me and I’ll tell you how I worked out the
secret, as there is no explanation in the book)
During a Tuesday morning run with some friends I heard a story
about a very old coffee tree. Apparently this was on East Timor Action
Network (ETAN) email feed. Anyway, apparently there was a world-wide coffee tree
blight in the 1920’s that was wiping everything out and someone discovered a
natural hybrid, here in Timor Leste, that was resistant to the blight. That
tree was somehow propagated around the world so that all other coffee trees
became resistant as well. Recently, this tree has been re-discovered. How is that
for an important bit of coffee trivia?
One of the new Financial system PCs had a problem at
Viqueque and I was the only one who could fix it. I estimated about an hour’s
work, but it was 5-6 hours return by car to Viqueque and I didn’t want to make such a
trip, because it would be an over-nighter and make me carsick + listen to the
driver’s sound track 8-9 times. We got the people in VQQ to deliver the PC to
Manatuto, so I could travel for only 90minutes, do the work and then go home
again. Worked nicely. Turned out that SQL didn’t like us using a specific
database name; so I changed it and everything worked fine after that. Now
identifying the actual problem and then testing a work-around took quite a
while – 3 hours.
Two weeks after starting tango lessons I was part of a
lunchtime crowd at Hotel Timor that became the first ever flash-mob in the
country! Or so we think. We entertained the lunchtime crowd in the dining area
for a couple of minutes and then dined at the pleasure of the Hotel. Exciting
and I was a bit nervous beforehand.
I am there somewhere in a white-striped shirt.
The Youtube link is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8EWRQYEBW0
