Not only is he wearing a Vespa T-shirt and a towel on his head, but I have no idea what kind of homemade cigarette he is smoking. It looks like a piece of bamboo. From the rice fields of Baucau…
It’s been five years since I left the UK. Throughout this time I’ve been adamant that I wouldn’t go back aside from the occasional visit. But now I’m faced with a dilemma.
Last year, I applied to do a master’s in Southeast Asian Studies, majoring in government and politics of modern Southeast Asia, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. And this week I was made an unconditional offer to start in September.
I only have about three weeks to decide what to do.
On the one hand, I have had a really good year in terms of work. I’m writing all the time and I’m hitting bigger and better publications while gradually getting better access to information. I’m by no means comfortable enough to retire, but I’m saving money and I could self-fund my master’s, although it would be a hefty investment.
The idea of leaving Southeast Asia isn’t a factor because my plan would be to return as soon as my master’s is finished. And I imagine I’d need to spend time here to complete my dissertation. So it would only be a short time away.
When I look at it like that, I recall how I spent six months away from Timor-Leste and just returned this past February, and yet I was able to pick up where I left off and carry on with my work. I know I could do it again.
So I’m asking myself why I want to do a master’s when I’m already content with my life and work here. Well, I don’t want to be merely “content” for the rest of my life.
I want to learn more about the politics of the region, in particular the politics of Indonesia. To have that academic understanding of politics in Southeast Asia, I think, would help me in my bid to broaden the scope of stories I write. I want to cover the region and be based in Jakarta. That’s my goal.
As someone said today, at the moment, I am just groping in the dark and learning as I work.
Furthermore, I have this craving to go back to school, to read for days on end, to be surrounded by likeminded, interesting people. I want to expand my horizons and to learn more about where I live.
I’m still following the same career path. I’m a journalist. That’s all I want to do — write stories. I haven’t had a full-time job in a year and a half and my life has never been better. When I look at my portfolio of stories I see how my work has progressed and matured over the years.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I know that, but here I am today in the kind of position where I feel like the world is my oyster, to use a cliche.
For the past couple of days I have also been pondering whether I would ever use what I’ve learned and look for some kind of full-time work here in Timor-Leste. Such opportunities haven’t presented themselves and I have really never looked for them.
I do have other work besides writing stories, but it’s part-time, short-term, project-based contract work. To be honest, I wish I had more work like that, but a full-time gig? Never say never, but it’s not high on my list.
What I have to really think about is how beneficial a master’s will be. For my chosen career, I am convinced that having a better understanding of Southeast Asia, including the Indonesian language modules I would take, will make me a better journalist. I also believe that if I choose the right topic for my dissertation, it will help me in the same way.
I have no problem with leaving Timor-Leste for a time. I don’t have anything to keep me in Timor-Leste other than my work and my fondness of the place itself.
The idea of some time in a big city is also appealing and, dare I say this, it would probably do me good to meet a nice girl and just chill for a bit. I don’t imagine such a thing happening in Dili any time soon, although I have tried, a bit.
There is more chance of me accepting the offer than declining it, but still, the fact that there is a choice to be made leads me to believe I should give it some decent thought.
On Saturday night we bid farewell to pretty much the only nightclub in Dili that is ever worth going to. Motion Bar will close its doors on Wednesday and with that we leave behind a lot of history in Dili in terms of the people who have run the place and the people who have been there.
I went to Motion on my first day in Dili a year and a half ago. It was closed for the afternoon, but still, I went and had a look. My friend and I threw a parties there when we could in an attempt to give ourselves and others some kind of nightlife alternative that didn’t involve Akon or anything reggae-related.
Motion’s most popular night was every Thursday, which had become something of an institution in Dili with the live local bands outside and DJs playing music inside, but it was the parties on other nights I most looked forward to.
Motion also hosted weekly movie nights, which was something of a blessing in a country that has no cinema. And the food at Motion was also great. So with all this in mind, we organized one last shindig there and combined it with my friend’s birthday party.
For anyone who went, I was the one DJing and playing all the music. I was still quite sick (with this illness) and had been to hospital the previous evening. My body was in some pain and I’d just begun a course of antibiotics, so I should have been in bed, but decided to slug it out.
When we do parties at Motion, we try not to indulge in music we don’t like, such as RNB, mainstream hip hop and suchlike. I mean, you can hear all that stuff at pretty much every single nightspot in Dili. There are ample places in the city where people can bump n grind, so once again I decided to play actual nightclub music, in a nightclub. It’s a radical idea, I know, but this city is supposedly all about progress.
I’ve been DJing for about 12 years in all. Once upon a time I’d spend all my money on vinyl. Now all those records are in someone’s house in Sheffield, I think. But last night was the first time I’d ever experienced such a barrage of bamboozling one-liners as this:
The answer to all these questions was a straight “no”, so to those people I am sorry, but I honestly thought the party went all right without succumbing to the wonders of inane pop music. People seemed genuinely offended and even quite angry, but this was the last night at Motion, not Mister Guitar or Casa Minha.
And come on, in how many clubs in Dili can you hear Underworld, The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, Booka Shade, Tiga, Zombie Nation and so on? Don’t get me wrong, I like good hip hop (Cage, GZA, Raekwon), but RNB is like the devil’s love music. It makes me want to pull my nails off.
But whatever, Motion was a great club, the people who run it are great people and we had a lot of good times there. So, farewell. This was one of the tunes I played towards the end.
I don’t know what it is with me these past few months, but I seem to be getting sick a lot more than normal. This latest illness was the worst yet. I was in Suai district doing a short training course at the media centre there when I began feeling ill. My throat was hurting, my body aching and my head sore. I thought nothing of it and went to bed early, but the next day it really hit me.
My body ached like hell all over, I was struggling to swallow, my head was banging and the lymph nodes in my neck were swollen and extremely painful. I was feeling nauseous and had completely lost my appetite. That night, I had such intense chills and fevers that I thought I’d mapped out a plan for an entire world war in my head. It was most bizarre.
The next day was more of the same. One minute I’d be shivering, the next I’d be sweating like a pig. My lymph nodes were huge by this point, kind of like when I had mumps at university. The car ride back from Suai was horrendous and I threw up pure bile twice.
It got so bad that my friends took me to hospital in Dili, where a Cuban doctor gave me a once-over and took a blood sample. I was prescribed antibiotics, paracetomol and these ginormous vitamin tablets that I can’t even swallow.
I started on my meds right away and that night I slept about 14 hours. And then in the morning I started to feel a bit more normal. I hadn’t eaten for two days and my body was exhausted, but I wasn’t in as much pain. And indeed, as the day progressed, I made a rapid recovery and managed to get myself to hospital to pick up my blood test results.
All the doctor could tell me was that I didn’t have malaria or dengue fever. So I have no idea what was wrong with me. My lymph nodes are still a little swollen and quite painful, especially on the left-hand side, so I’m wondering if maybe I had glandular fever or something similar. I also feel like I have a regular cold now and I'm sneezing and all sorts.
In short, it was two days of misery, another two days of half-misery and now a cold. Someone reading this must have been through something similar, right? I’d love to know what was wrong with me.
For any family members who might read this, I really am OK now, so there’s no need to worry.
Before I arrived in Timor-Leste, I didn’t know a whole lot about NGOs, aid work or any of that business. I’d heard people talk negatively about NGOs, but never really grasped why. Here in Timor-Leste, I’ve come to the conclusion that aid workers are a misunderstood group — misunderstood because it’s difficult to really fathom exactly what they do.
I usually try and avoid talking about work with people I’m unfamiliar with. I do this for a few reasons. The first is that my job is simple to explain: I write stories. That’s all I do. Sometimes I also edit stories, I guess, but there isn’t a whole lot of variation in what I do to make a living. It really doesn't sound all that impressive.
But when aid workers start talking about what they do, it’s like a foreign language to me. I’ve been in Dili about a year and a half now and there’s still so much about the aid world that baffles me.
But it isn’t just NGOs. It’s everyone, from the UN to USAID. So many times I’ve been listening to people talking about what they do and had to really think about what the words mean. It’s like a sudoku puzzle, of sorts, and I'm rubbish at sudokus.
Part of the problem, I’m sure, is that people have complicated jobs. This is why I don’t like talking about work. I just write stories. Other people are advisors coordinating capacity-building outreach programmes to assist the general development of the Ministry of Such and Such and… well, I made that up. But you see my point. I'm not all that important in the grand scheme of things.
Everyone here seems to be saving the world. Even their job titles are impressive. I have a little booklet full of business cards. In it are things like “General Development Officer” and “Development Outreach and Communication Officer.” Very exciting stuff.
I have this nagging feeling that I’m alone in my confusion, but sometimes I think the weird job titles and descriptions serve the sole purpose of deflecting attention away from the fact that the person in question doesn’t really do very much at all.
There are, after all, a lot of people in Timor-Leste on ludicrously huge salaries. I know at least some of those people don’t do a whole lot.
But I’m probably just jealous.
You'll have to excuse me for generalising here. I do try my best, but, alas, I have much to learn. Obviously there are a good number of people doing really great stuff here in Timor-Leste. Check out PDT or L'ao Hamutuk or HAI for starters.
