How do you see Dili?
I guess this won't be of interest to anyone who doesn't live in Dili, but these two paragraphs from an Adelaide Now story caught my attention:
Riding in one of the many yellow cabs that trundle the one-way thoroughfares at a lazy 20km/h, it's apparent that not much is going on, nor has been going on, in what you'd call the central business district. A solitary crane breaks the Dili skyline. It doesn't appear to move during the week or so we are there. The roads of Dili are lined with buildings burnt out in 1999, or in the more recent problems in 2006. New, glossy, often foreign-owned buildings, sit behind 3.5m-high fences garlanded with razor wire. Disrepair is the rule for most buildings, and burnt-out cars double as play equipment for children.
The expat haunts, filled with block-headed security personnel and endless NGO staff, are an exception, with their new slick paint jobs and generous selections of mocktails and high-end liquor.
Thoughts?
The Adelaide reporter's approach seemed to be to drive around town and then parse first impressions so they can be filed under existing prejudices: failed state, greedy NGO workers, lazy locals. It would have helped if this person had actually talked to some people.
I have only been here a year and yet already notice the difference. How about the new park in front of Hotel Timor? How about the clearance of the IDP camps? And as for 'foreign-owned buildings', apart from embassies (and yes, the new Chinese Embassy is an eyesore), and the complex ethnicity of the ownership of the new buildings (Chinese-Timorese, Macau-Timorese, Portuguese-Timorese, Indonesian-Timorese), the law states that foreigners cannot own land, so to portray Dili's development as a foreign land-grab is probably unfair.