moving to Baucau

Finally the time is arrived. After the two weeks of logistical preparation I’ve finally moved to my “so called” duty station. In fact my definitive place from where I am going to offer my work performance is not Dili the Timorese capital city but Baucau, the second-largest city of the country (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baucau). The way to come here is a three hours very pleasant and beautiful journey. In fact almost the entire way is located along the seaside, going up and down due to the pretty much mountainous landscape. The postcards views are uncountable. For the rest, the internal landscape is pretty much dry and sometimes it seems even desert. There is only one “city” along the way called Manatuto, but since I was together with some FAO staff and we were quite in hurry because several meeting planned for the same day I did not really had the time to have a look around. I did not even take any pics (as usual), maybe the next time when I will go back to Dili. Yes because I will need to go often: in Baucau there is not a supermarket and mostly of the “normal” commodities but especially dairy products such as milk, cheese, yogurt and so on it not possible to find. In town there are only open markets and just a little more. Baucau people really adopt the truly short supply chain!

 

 For the moment I am still based in a school residence waiting for to find my final place where to stay. It has been impressive how quickly the rumour spread around about an “Italian FAO member” that was looking for a house to rent in town. A kind of competition to bring me around started up in town and now, I think to have seen almost the entire properties available (and more) in the surrounding. Of the several places visited, three are my favourite. But since I will open the new FAO office in town exactly in my house, my word is important but it is not the only one. For the next week a meeting with the rest of the FAO staff is fixed here in town, so decision will be taken soon.

 Very soon some more description of the place. Keep tuned.

Comoro Beach

After my arrival in Timor Leste on Wednesday 24th, due to the immediate request of the UN regulations and the normal course of the recruitment procedures, I had to wait until the first week end in order to make my first visit to the beach.

I have to be sincere, before to leave Berlin I realized that I have never seen a tropical beach before in my life. Since then, I have not been able to hidden my special emotion to anybody. My mind was able only to imagine something which I only saw in tour operator books or holiday’s friends’ pics. My mind created into itself imagines of quite and sunny lines of white sand, which are stroked by a waveless sea and surrounded by a green line of palm trees. Well that what I started to expect when I decided to move to Timor. In some conversation before to leave Berlin, I made present this situation with some friends already: I have never been before in a tropical country near the sea side. I do not know for instead the Caribbean countries, Thailand or Bali and son on. So for me, the last Saturday, when I visited the Comoro beach a bit outside Dili city, it was officially my very first time.

So with a good and relaxed time schedule and after a pretty good breakfast at the Tropical Bakery, together with my friend Magda, we decided to visit one of the various beaches of Dili. As it easily understandable, around Dili, the capital city of Timor Leste, there are no the best beaches of the country. Everybody says that the best ones are located in other parts of the island, especially in the north east, but well, here we are and somewhere we have to start.

The way to go the Comoro beach is quite special. It goes through a very original Timorese district made of wood houses, plenty of banana trees and chicken and goats scattered around. The beach is located exactly in the nearby of the Dili airport, which is not as annoying as it would be normal to expect: That is due to the fact that in Dili regularly there are only two flies per day.

Arrived at destination, I was obviously impressed already from the first view. Despite to be so near to the urban area, this part of the sea side is pretty much wild and spectacular. In fact many of the elements that I imagined in my mind before, they resulted to be there in their place: the sea, the beach and the palms are exactly where I expected they are. But even more impressive was the temperature of the water. Despite to be used to the warmish Mediterranean Sea, here the feeling is very different. It doesn’t even came up the lightest cold perception. Maybe the sea was not so calm but it was very very warm and to be flooded for while it was a truly pleasure.

Nevertheless at the beginning, despite Magda was making fun of me, I did not stay so quite and relaxed in the water. In this part of the world, the sea is quite famous for the presence of a quite broad variety of marine species of animals of all sorts. Amongst them, they are very well-known the maritime crocodiles.  Yes, they are not as frequent as it used to be along the coastlines of the near Australia, but well, there are somehow. At the compulsory UN security course, it is one of the most argued issues as well as amongst the international community of Timor Leste. Despite that, the statistics are on behalf of the almost totally security of the sea in Timor. But as you can imagine, the statistics of course are important, but to float in the water thinking about to who suddenly can come out to make strange gag, it is a different issue. Anyhow standing up the Magda’s jokes and keeping it as a simply little story, we just enjoyed until something else really likewise unexpected came out.

Suddenly form the palms trees on the back of the beach, a happy and loud crew of funny local boys came out. They became immediately familiar and they started to try to find out some kind of games to play together in the water with us. It was pretty crazy and funny. Since I do not speak Tetun, the local language, I could not really communicate with them. Magda a bit more then me, but we could not really chatt with them. Finally after some water jokes we left the water still followed by the funny crew that started to enjoy my camera. They became crazy to see them inside the screen of and all the time when they were in front of the camera lens, they acted as fighters. The funniest thing was when they brought to us a coconut in order to open and share with us. In fact this was my first coconut in Timor. The coconut milk was pretty good but the pulp I have to say it was not the best ever. Nevertheless it was very funny to open and share the nut with such funny crew.

The day runs away simply and nicely like this. Despite that Comoro Beach is not considerate the best beach in Timor Leste, for me it was absolutely a great beginning.

my first hours in Dili

Arriving at Dili airport, I pleasantly found to pick my up a small welcome committee. My former IMRD master course colleague Luis more the driver who was in charge to pick me up. To arrive in such far place of the world, after almost three days travelling, to find a well-known face in front of the exit gate, it gives always a very nice surprise.

After the normal greetings and hugs with Luis and the introduction to the driver, they drove me straight to the hotel which was my first location in Dili. During the short car tour along the street from the airport to the hotel, I started to watch out of the window in order to quiet the strong feeling of curiosity that I started to acquire at the moment that I became aware about this new experience in Timor.

But I would not have so long time for looking around or anything, I was of course very excited and curios. Since it was still afternoon time, I was very much happy when I got a message from Fabrizio, the FAO project director, which invited me to take a short rest in the hotel and afterwards to go to the office for the in order to have the first presentation and to start to solve several bureaucratic issues.

So in about an hour, I was already ready to go to have a look of the base, which would be my future reference office.

Since I have never experienced an UN base, going there made me pretty much excited. At the moment that I went inside for the very first time, the security procedures to get into the base also made me think about to be still in a country which became reconciled just few months ago. At that time my knowledge about Timor Leste were still pretty much limited. But of course my curiosity suddenly starts to run very fast.

about Timor Leste

As beginning, in order to make clear where I am, I think it will be useful to give a short brief about this the peculiar country Timor Leste.

First of all I want to make clear about the name of the country. It is not difficult to be confused by the several names spreading around: East Timor, Timor Leste, Timor Oriental and finally Timor Lorosae. In fact these are nothing else that the various translation forms respectively in English, Portuguese, Spanish and Tetun. The latter is the local formalized language but the portuguese one Timor Leste is the most adopted currentlly. This will be the name that will adopted more often inthis blog. This mess of names and their accepted use is given by the turbulent history of this country which has been competed by different colonial powers in the past centuries.

In fact the East part of the island of  Timor was colonized by Portugal during the 16th century until the 1975, when the independence of Timor Leste was declared. During those times, The Netherlands colonized the near Indonesia. Between the two European powers there were basically bad neighborhood relations that several time leaded even to armed confrontations.

The two different colonization periods were cause of two different kind of cultural developments basically related with the religion: the West part of the island under the Indonesian influence developed a Muslim religion, while the Est part became one of the most roman catholic region of Asia.

Afterward the Portuguese left, Indonesia invaded the territory of Timor Leste in order to incorporate it as its 27th province. The Indonesian colonization period is remembered as controversial and dark as far as in 1999 the United Nation supported the self-determination process of Timor Leste. As consequence, 20 May 2002 finally Indonesia left the control of the territory and Timor Leste became an independent state.

Nowadays Timor Leste is one of the youngest country in the world: According with the CIA Factbook database, Timor Leste population is estimate around one million (in 2010 is declared the general new census) composed of 97% of Timorense and the rest part is shared amongst Indonesian, Chinese and Portuguese communities. Nowadays, due to the UN mission and the presence of others humanitarian organization, in the country there are living approximately above 4000 expatriate people, which since last week, I am also taking part.

Concerning the geographic situation, Timor Leste shares the only land boundary with West Timor, which is part of Indonesia. Moreover inside the West part of the island there is the enclave of Oecussi, which is located on the northwest portion of the island but it is integrated part of  Timor Leste. To the south, Timor Leste shares the sea border in the Timor Sea with Australia.

Due to its special gegraphic position, the island of  Timor always represented a cross point in the region. Different ethnic groups such as Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian), Papuan and even Chinese  colonized the territory. In many cases the island has been adopted as place of passage during the oceanic journeys. In fact is a common way to say that nobody is really native of Timor and the history is still going ahead.