Estuda Tetum

Now that I am in East Timor, I have a much better sense of what NDI is doing and who works here. The organization is currently working on three projects: to establish and train suco (village) councils, to work with the Parliament’s Committee B (governing security issues) and to contribute to a coalition devoted to elections monitoring, get-out-the-vote initiatives (known as “GOTV”) and voter education.

Yesterday I spent the morning, with the help of a translator, interviewing one of the field trainers about her work with the suco councils. While I am glad to have taken Indonesian classes, it is becoming more and more clear that this office operates in Tetum and English. Indonesian has been helpful for informal conversations and when buying groceries, but in meetings Timorese staff members (that is everyone but Telibert and myself) speak in Tetum, which is then translated into English by the office manager.

Because of the jetlag, I have been waking up around 5 am each morning and using that time to study Tetum. It is not a difficult language, and mercifully, like Indonesian, verbs are not conjugated. It is, however, turning my linguistic world upside down. I spent the entire summer trying to banish my Spanish and think in Indonesian, and now, because of the heavy influence of Portuguese, I have to coax back all that vocabulary. So far it seems that 2/3 of Tetum is either derived from Indonesian or romance languages (e.g., “le” is to read in Tetum, “leer” is to read in Spanish). The question is, when I don’t know word, do I go East or West?

Hau hakarak komensa estuda Tetum! I want to begin learning Tetum!