Among all the palaver of the past couple of weeks, every now and then I wonder what I’m really doing or what direction I’d like my life to take; when I arrived in Dili I had only vague aspirations with no idea whether they were too “out there”, even for me.

One afternoon last week, a girl from one of the local newspapers showed me a place where you can eat for a buck fifty. I’ve no idea what most of what I ate was, but there was chicken and it was deep fried to such an extreme that the bits you wouldn’t normally be able to eat became edible.

That one day was all about finding direction. I had a fear that I would arrive in East Timor, become a hobo or a full-time backpacker and never do anything besides bum around from place to place. Part of me would love to do that, forever, but I need something constructive to do or else I end up spending my time playing with toothpicks.

I had three meetings, if you can call them meetings: one was in a café, one in a restaurant and one, the most important, was a morning meet-up in a dusty yard with about ten people sat in a circle on plastic chairs, moving every few minutes as the sun pushed the shadows back farther. Before the meeting I’d spent half an hour goofing around with some kids in the yard of one of the local churches.

The meeting in the yard was with the staff of a small-time newspaper. Their office is just a dark shack and each of them volunteers his or her time, but (almost) every week on time, they produce a newspaper, half in Tetun, half in English. The passion these people have for producing the newspaper blew me away and to see what they create is amazing. It’s not perfect, but it’s something they’re proud off and can build on.

I sat down unsure what would come of the meeting; they bought me a can of Coke and laid on a spread of biscuits, offering me cigarettes and even presenting me with a traditional Timorese scarf that you hang around your neck equal on both sides. The whole meeting was videotaped and I had my picture taken a few times for an ID card and also for my “formal introduction” in the pages of the newspaper – I think.

For about an hour we talked about the paper and what direction they want to take it. We brainstormed and came up with ideas and plans for how we could make it better. I have nothing better to do so I’ve decided to offer some of my time to work with them. A native English speaker will open up new possibilities and I will have the chance to buddy up with local journalists and go around Dili and the rest of Timor-Leste on the hunt for stories.

It’s a great opportunity for me to learn about the country, to pick up the language, meet a lot of people and realize a lot of the ideas have been stumbling over each other in my head like drunken fools. Funding is a separate issue, but there are people here in Dili who can help and I now have access to the Internet when I need it, so I can make some bucks online in my spare time.

At the moment, from where I’m sat, it’s about as full-proof of a plan as I can possibly muster. I plan to set up an English-language website for the newspaper and begin to build up content, which will attract visitors and then catch the attention of advertisers.

I’m optimistic about this because the possibilities are endless and there are a lot of people here with great ideas.

That’s as good an answer as I can give to the question, What are you going to do in East Timor?