East Timor Notebook: Hateh logo, Timor-Leste!

4th July
Somewhere between Dili and Denpasar

It’s the fourth of July and I am on a plane. I took one last look at Timor and its cold, foggy mountains, the 100% cotton clouds, the blue skies.



It’s goodbye to the four little kids in Villa Clara—Acela, Asoko, Abai and Anoko.

Goodbye to Kevin, who could be a pain in the ass sometimes, but was a good guy in his own way.

Goodbye to Humberto and Boni, who were the best Timorese partners possible in a team like ours.

Goodbye to Ainaro and all its cute ponies, piggies and especially the cows that are still animals* and not beef.

Goodbye to the aussies, who were all so kind and were great election observers. Goodbye to Damon and Tom, who let Kevin and me tag along their hike up the hill on Sunday afternoon, to get a good look at Ainaro from above.

Goodbye to all the UNPol, especially Joginder from Singapore, who was always looking out for the tired and hungry at the counting center.

Goodbye to the hard working (and good looking!) UNV peeps, even to the funny German guy who flirted so outrageously that it was amusing.

Goodbye Hans, goodbye Gustav, who were always a pleasure to have around, especially for games of “name the author” and other trivia, on the sidelines of vote-counting.


this way to dili

And goodbye to the team: Jill and her leadership, her attention to process rather than just output, the good food, good wine and good conversation, the cigarette breaks, the airport send-off and the tais; Dee and the lucky lighter she was sweet to leave behind for me—it brought me back safely from Ainaro but exploded last night when it fell out of my pocket at dinner; Bron, who cemented our friendship from Day 1 by suggesting that I move into the blue room and share it with her, her open-heartedness and ready smile; Endie, my first friend in Dili, with the smoke breaks on the veranda and late at night on the back porch, the insights into Timorese society, politics and the international solidarity movement; Jeff, for the trash runs and security checks with the Kiwis down the road; David, Willy, Barbara, Roy, Jakob, Sue, Katha…

I’ve just landed in Bali. My heart is heavy, not for sadness, but because it is full.



* On Sunday morning, after the elections, Kevin and I took a walk down the field behind the primary school in front of Villa Clara. There was a group of five cows, including a couple of calfs, grazing. As I walked toward them, they ran away and it struck me as odd. I realized why: they were acting like animals normally act around humans—evasive and wary, on the defensive—and not like slabs of uncut beef. As Belinda from the Aussie observer group put it: they were still able to express their cow-ness! The alpha cow kept one eye on the herd and one eye on us the whole time.


This was my first trip to East Timor. Won’t be my last.

East Timor Notebook: How did I end up here? cont'd

1st July
Counting Center, Ainaro

The possibility of actually going to East Timor was a kernel of an idea because of the paper that I’m revising. I was always apologizing for not having done any field research to substantiate my paper. I remember writing, at the start of the year, about how I was simply not doing enough with my life, and asking myself: is tomorrow the day I finally go to East Timor?




And here I am.

East Timor Notebook: How did I end up here?

30 June. Election Day.
Sitting on a hillock outside a Polling Center, Ainaro

East Timor. How did I end up here? The story as I tell it is this: I’d first heard, even just heard, of the country when I was a freshman or sophomore at don’the University of the Philippines. APCET (Asia-Pacific Solidarity Coalition for East Timor, methinks) had invited Ramos-Horta to speak on campus and then president Fidel Ramos barred him from entering the country. In some circles, particularly in UP—which holds academic freedom above all (or mostly) else, there was a furor, and I was dimly, dimly aware of it. I really don’t know how the incident seeped into my consciousness, but my mind retains an image of Ramos-Horta’s face on a poster about the event. That was in ’93 or ’94. Probably a consequence of international attention on the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre.


santa cruz cemetary

in 1991, to protest the killing of sebastiao gomes, a student activist, hundreds of timorese in dili walked in a procession to the santa cruz cemetary, where indonesian troops trapped the protesters and killed a reported 271 people with hundreds of others injured, hospitalized and 'disappeared'.

In September ’99, I had just moved to Singapore. On the daily commute to hang out with Junior at the Yacht Club, I’d read the Straits Times—its coverage of Southeast Asia especially. Somehow, I followed the developments in the news as the 1999 referendum for independence in East Timor unfolded. I’d complain to Junior: why hasn’t the UN intervened? Then, why have only the Australians sent troops? Et cetera.

In April 2000, I was thrilled to discover the Singapore International Film Fest. My graduate studies and scholarship hadn’t yet started yet, and Junior and I was still living very simply on his salary. I was surviving on a contract for some technical writing (a procedures manual) from the Yacht Club. But I allowed myself this one luxury: to watch as many films as I could in the week and a half of the film fest. One of which was Punitive Damages.

Punitive Damages is a documentary about a young Malaysian student activist named Kamal Bamadhaj. It’s about the underground student movement in East Timor that developed in the 1990s. It’s about the human rights groups and NGOs in Australia and elsewhere that supported this movement. It’s about Kamal, killed among the Timorese massacred in the Santa Cruz cemetary by the Indonesian military. And the case lodged by his family in American courts that indicted the culpable parties, though none have been brought to justice.

At the screening, they sold copies of a book of Kamal’s journal and essays and analyses by his sister, Nadja, of the political context of Kamal’s life and death: the Suharto regime, the occupation of East Timor, and military oppression in other places such as Aceh and Irian Jaya. I read the book avidly and finished it fairly quickly, poring over it through silent evenings in the little bedroom that was home then.


christo rei or christ the king, a massive statue overlooking built in dili by, oddly enough, the indonesians

In Kyaw’s class on social movement theory, I decided to write my course paper on East Timor. I read books and books on the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor and on Fretilin especially. John Taylor, Helen Hill (who I met in Dili, completely randomly, last Thursday!), Noam Chomsky, Matthew Jardine, Constancio Pinto, Ramos-Horta, Joao Saldanha—through these authors, I tried to understand what had happened in East Timor. Pinto, an underground movement student leader who fled to the US, is now ambassador to the US. Saldanha is the lead candidate and president of the Partido Republikan. I attended their campaign rally at Kampo Demokrasya.

So I’ve got this paper. I presented a version at the International Convention of Asia Scholars in 2005 in Shanghai and Kasarinlan Journal of Third World Studies is interested in publishing it.

East Timor Notebook: You know how people always say that having children will change you?

26th June
Dili

You know how people always say that having children will change you?

Until Gabby, I’d always been dismissive of children. Not that I disliked them. Not at all. There have been plenty of occasions where I prefered the company of children to grown ups. I still remember what it was like, holing out in my bedroom, hoping not to have to entertain my parents’ guests. Seeing affluent foreigners in a country like Burma or Cambodia going all Angelina Jolie with the children had always made me cringe inwardly.

But things are remarkably, remarkably different now.

I see children suffering, little children who should have every chance as anyone to a decently life, suffering, my heart contracts painfully into a little fist, and I see Gabby’s sweet face on theirs, thinking of the impossible.

Oh Timor-Leste.
Maubere, maubere,
stand up, and let me stand with you.
Your wounds are the wounds of all humanity,
your hopes are too.

Maubere, maubere,
you sing without sorrow,
you dance without tears.

Remind us what it’s like
to love a people,
to dream a tomorrow.

East Timor Notebook: What is a full life?

25 June 2007
Dili

What is a full life? Pessoa argues that one should abdicate from life, otherwise abdicate from one’s self. To belong to something is banal. Creed, ideal, wife, profession: prison cells, shackles.

I gallop in the opposite direction. I feel mortality closing in on me and race to fill my life with ideals, with living out my dreams, with pursuits of grandeur, with turning my hobbies into passions. Because it is an effort, there is a skein of falsehood in this attempt. And yet, how can it not be an effort? How can I not push myself to achieve more, to travel farther, and to fill, fill, fill the pages of my notebooks and screens with the words and evidence of the density of my life.

I can’t pause. I can’t stand still. I’m a motor that is constantly running.

Last week, EC tender.
These two weeks, election observer mission in East Timor.
After that, Chiaroscuro.

And now, I am alone with Pessoa’s coffee cup and cigarette, following the blinking cursor to the next thought.

Traveling to Dili was like travelling to any destination I’d gone to before. Sitting here and typing on my iBook, alone in the living room, is no different from staying up until the wee hours of the morning, doing the same thing with Gabby and Junior sound asleep upstairs at home.

Thirty years and I still can’t tell you the meaning of my life.

I’ve tried so hard to be independent, need no one, touch nothing; but without the love and friendship of the people around me, I’d be bereft and forlorn.

I need to be liked, I need to be loved. Respect and admiration are food for the craven soul.

From needing to be the good girl, as a child, I’ve grown to needing to be a great person.

I wish I could write, right now, about all my mundane observations in coming to Dili for the first time. Is this the Dili of my dreams? In that, Pessoa was right: nothing in reality could ever be as good as their versions in our imagination, in the ether where there exists only two: you and your thoughts.

Dili was familiar territory because I’m always carrying around the same baggage of who I am. There is nothing alien about the wide, empty highways and the small, uneven streets, littered with the rubble of 25 years of Indonesia’s brutal military occupation.

You don’t see it in the wide, smiling eyes of the women and children. Children play in the street, scattered by the occasional big vans with “UN” emblazoned on them. They play soccer and own the road. They laugh and practice English on me and on any foreigner they see, probably. They grab at the US dollars of my guilt for being a thousand times more affluent than them. They sing and dance and link hands with you and step forward, step back. Maubere, they sing, man, woman, stand up for Timor Loro’sae.