After almost a month without to get connects with my blog, here I am again. What is going on is that I am still in a provisory situation in Baucau. At my arrival in town I have been hosted in a nuns’ residential house and from there I started to get in touch with my new place. I have been looking for a house to rent which at the same time it needs to serve also as FAO office in town, but basically I started to work so I did not have so much time to get in internet privately since in the office I do not have access to facebook or my blog web page.
Anyhow, here I am and I am doing fine. Slowly slowly I am getting in touch with my new town but most important I am discovering the Valley where my project is based. It is called Seiçal Valley due to Seiçal River that it runs along it. It is located nearby toward east from Baucau town. On the east side of the Valley is located the Matebien Mountain which from its almost 3 000 m asl dominates the entire valley. In Seiçal valley there are located 15 communities (Sucos) which are divided in several small villages (Aldeas) for an estimated population of 65 000 people.
Our rural development project aims to include all the inhabitants of the Valley in a root based crops and livestock production activities support. The project aims to develop some basic technique for agriculture production and animal breeding. In order to archive that, we are planning to organize some training courses and at the same time we will supply some basic production inputs such as seeds and some hand tools. I can guess that many of you will demand: why you and FAO need to go in such far valley in order to teach to local people how to grow crops and to breed animals? I have to say that such question can appear normal as well as justified from a far point of view. But in order to understand the local situation, it is necessary to go back along the history of this young country. In fact it is not an aim of this blog to give opinion about what is right and what is not concerning Timor-Leste future social and economical development. This is especially due to the fact that I am here since too short period of time which does not allow me to give a personal relevant opinion about the issue yet. What I can say for the moment is that Timor-Leste has been colonized by Portuguese for several centuries as far as it has been occupied by Indonesia from 1975 until 1999. Before the two historical periods indigenous were not engaged in agriculture, they were more a collect and fisheries society. At the same time the population increased dramatically until today. In fact Timor-Leste account the highest birth rate in the worlds and to guarantee food security to this country which is still a net food importer is the priority. During the colonial periods both Portugal and Indonesia did not contribute too much to the local economy development, so nowadays lack of technical skills can be considerate as the main problem towards development. That is the reason why, amongst our main objectives there is to spread knowledge and practical skills concerning local resources uses amongst the population. In particular the project aims is to improve production of food and at the same time to transfer knowledge concerning how to manage it, especially in term of conservation.
For the moment it seems a hard task but we just started. Only the coming months or years will be able to tell us the true.
During the last weeks I have been involved into the first phase of the project: I started to carry on a participative approach in the field in order to point out the main problems for the people and at the same time to figure out the main local strengths in order to coordinate and connect the project activities between the two points. I have to confess that the night before to go for the very first time to a community I was very excited and worry at the same time. I carried out such methodology already several times but I have never done it as the unique manager of the operation. During my development studies and professional experience I already did the planning of the work steps, the communication of them to the participants and the implementation. But to do all together alone it seemed to me a very weird task. Of course I was supported by Jose and Custodio, my two local agronomists, but their role is basically put in practice what I say, so I did not have so many advisors. Because that, the night before to start I even consulted some colleagues in Dili but also in Italy and in Germany. Mainly it was for a moral support I have to say, but some external contribution was necessary.
Finally I have to say that the first five community evaluation worked out pretty well. The participants – with normal variation – were pretty much involved and I did not have so much communication problems. I prepared a Tetun presentation of myself and the rest public talks I did in English while Jose were translating for me. During the group discussion I spoke in Portuguese, since the oldest generations still retain the former colonial language. Here some pics of the suco Bahamori, the first community visited.
Soon more updates.
