Remixio

I am just back from four days and three nights of observing suco (village) council trainings in Remixio - a small town about an hour up into the hills behind Dili. Remixio was so fresh and cool and green it felt like diving into a river. Upon arriving I learned the word for mist, abuabu, a piece of vocabulary that had been rendered irrelevant by the dust* of Dili.

The pictures are taken from a hill-top shrine overlooking the town. I stayed with Camillo, the NDI trainer, at his house with his wife and four little kids (including a set of 2 y.o twins) and various relations who came in the evening to watch an Indonesian soap opera set in a beauty salon. The partially visible roof in the foreground of the below photo is his. The building under construction is a dorm for Catholic nuns.



* "Dust" in Tetun is rai-suar, literally ground-smoke. Tetun has lots of great compound words, ranging from isin-rua (lit. two-bodied) for pregnant to a whole group with been (juice), e.g. inus-been (lit. nose-juice, snot) and bani-been (lit. bee-juice, honey). A final risqué example: lasan-fuan (lit. penis-fruit, testicle.)

Pool

In November I wrote briefly about ‘third spaces’ – places that are neither home nor work where one feels comfortable. In Providence, my third spaces (coffee shops, libraries, bookstores) were all supported by the university community, and without that same force here in Dili, I have missed these quiet, public, semi-academic retreats.

Lately, I have been thinking about the impact of security problems on the availability of third spaces. I hear again and again about the loss of street life in Dili. As security fluctuates, the number of men, and especially women, on the street and at the markets rises and falls dramatically.

The costs of security problems are nor just casualties and economic losses. Something important, and salutary, and civic disappears when people only slide between home and work.

I returned from Bali to learn that my problem of third spaces had been solved. A pool had opened: free, very safe, rarely used and open late. It is the largest pool in Dili and it is inside the US Embassy compound.

So now I go out in the evenings after work and exercise, and I do not have to worry about security. At dusk, the huge embassy compound is almost always empty and after handing over my NDI ID tag, I walk around the big mowed lawns to get to the pool.

Swimming, I sometimes think what I would look like from Wikimapia – a person in a pool, inside a gate, inside another gate, next to the sea. It is a sad image. I am so close to the real ocean, yet I am swimming inside a box, inside a box, inside a box.

In Dili, I often think about the mechanics of security in terms of SUVs, gated compounds, generators and security guards, but these factors really describe daily life – movement, peace of mind, comfort and the access to the types of third spaces that disappear for most when times get tough. It is the erosion of daily life that I see in Dili, not the military patrols or the rock fights, that gives me a tiny glimpse into the deadening costs of conflict in Iraq and around the world.

Tomatoes

In recent weeks I have been a bit jealous that the cold weather has returned to the east coast. I have been thinking about winter - exultant cross-country ski trips into the Dartmouth land grant, pond skating in Winchester, and frozen snot and eyelashes while wobbling along the East Bay bike path. Wool hats. Wind blasting down Thayer Street.

Part of me can’t reconcile with the unswerving heat of the tropics.

But then I go to the market and buy those tomatoes and think I am not so crazy after all. So please keep torturing me with stories of tele skiing on Sugarloaf, I have plenty of pictures of beefsteaks and beaches to lob back!

Security Update

It was bound to happen sometime. I have been in Dili for almost five months, and before yesterday, despite the frequency of rock-throwing incidents, I had never seen any fighting in Dili.

On Saturday, I drove four friends back from a hash run in Tasitolu along Comoro road. The sun had yet to set and the headlights were not on yet. Right past the Australian Embassy traffic slowed and became disorganized, and looking to my right I noticed a young man holding a massive machete. Not good.

Looking left, friends saw another man launch a massive stone toward the opposite side of the street. Again, not good.

Strangely enough, the car in front of me was also from NDI. I pushed my way forward and followed it closely though the halting traffic and took the next turn off Comoro road. A minute later we were zipping along the beach road, sun setting, palms swaying.

First, I am glad that no one was hurt, that the car was undamaged and that everyone kept her cool. Second, I am relieved to have finally seen what these incidents look like, which, I found out, is not much. While the bigger confrontations involve over fifty people, I now realize that more common (and difficult to spot and thus avoid) are those like the one we drove through: ten guys on either side of the road, stones, traffic. This also explains the difficulties that the UN Police and Joint Task Force has had in making arrests – the guys can just disappear.

The targets of the violence remain rival gangs and rival martial arts groups, but as yesterday showed you don’t have to be a target to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

On a final note, the significance of this incident was heightened by the fact that a convoy of three NDI vehicles was ambushed in Iraq this week. Four people were killed, including one NDI staff member and three private security personnel from Unity Resources Group; two more were injured. There is more information about this sad news on NDI’s website.

Sarong, soright

In the past some - Hillel, Bo, Reyn, Meglet - have questioned my penchant for plaid sarongs. But it turns out that I am actually among the fashion avant-garde: Mary-Kate Olsen is also in the club.

Dili Allstars

Multimedia extravaganza!



The Dili Allstars are a reggae band founded in the mid-90s and now based in Australia. The video is fantastic, and it well represents the quirks and character of Dili street life - they even include beach pigs.

Note: For those new to YouTube, I find the best approach is to press play and then pause the video while it loads completely. Depending on connection speed this may take a little while.

Bird's Eye View

I have just included my office on the Wikimapia map of Dili and Timor Leste. It is near the northern-most playing field.

Fallon Redux

In October I wrote briefly about a visit to Dili by Admiral William Fallon and the subsequent discouraging coverage on NPR.

Admiral Fallon is in the news again, this time because of his nomination (7 January 2007) to take control of Central Command and oversee US engagement in both Afghanistan and Iraq. CentCom stretches from the Horn or Africa into Kazakhstan (see map). The New York Times Week in Review has interesting comments on the choice of a member of the Navy, rather than the Army or Marines, to take the post. He currently leads all forces in the Pacific.

Rhode Islanders may also wish to take note: Admiral Fallon attended the Naval War College in Newport.


(Thanks L for the tip.)

Book High

“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me... I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?”

That – that is how good it felt to sit on a little wooden stool in Ganesha Bookshop in Ubud. The smell of books, the search. I spent a whole afternoon there going through their wall labeled “Indonesian Studies” (How cool is that? See photo) checking indexes and making a small pile of books relating to Timor Leste.

I ended up with three: one very good, one okay and the third, which I read in the afternoon and then woke up in the middle of the night to finish, transformative. It hit me as the type of scholarship that I want to do. In Troubled Waters: Borders, Boundaries and Possession in the Timor Sea, Ruth Balint used constructivism to interrogate the assumptions – such as with the designation “traditional” – in Australian border security policy, looking at how the government rewrote the ocean landscape and the history of Rotanese fishermen in the area.

While her work looked at the interactions between a major power and a fishing community it was more than a David and Goliath tale or the regional equivalent of an ugly American story – it was about ways of seeing the world, about the conflicting realities of the precise “boxes” drawn on charts and the fluid landmarks used by fisherman, about sovereignty and ownership and colonization, and about discourses of xenophobia.

I lent it to Orla (on the ship) and before it makes it way back to me I hope that others will take a look. For me, the book bridged my world as someone interested in security policy with the ship’s interest in the nuances and histories of littoral communities across the region. It brought my beloved world of the ship into a brief, close embrace with the nerd-palace of the Watson Institute.


Here is a transcript of an interview with the author on Australian radio.

Woot woot

I have been working on a research project for people in the States for a long time, and today I sent in a final draft. The research did not go as smoothly (and more importantly, quickly) as I had promised, and I had been feeling pretty lousy about it.

And while there may be more to do, for now it is done! No more Bonyads (foundations established in Iran post-1979 to administer nationalized industries) for Kate!

Technotopia

I was onboard when Ferdi brought the first DVD player to the ship from Germany. We had a small television in the library and soon amassed a collection of pirated futurist films – Rollerball, 2001, Blade Runner. There was also single desktop PC on which I wrote emails to carry into port on a floppy disk (uphill, both ways).

Since I left the ship in 2002, the crew has been speeding into the digital world and the ship now buzzes with electronic music making, navigational software, countless personal laptops, a digital video studio, memory sticks, GIS, solar panels, photo archives, an LCD projector, personal cellphones and a satellite phone. There is not even a TV anymore.

These technological leaps have created some of the greatest changes to ship-life since I left, for better or worst. Personal gadgets are everywhere. People can escape and watch DVDs in their bunks. Blah blah blah American youth these days! Blah blah iPods blah! O the anomie!

More interesting is how technology has also become a creative, well-integrated force on the ship. In checking in with long-term crewmembers, each invariably highlighted hi-tech experiments. Heather shot digital video during the last voyage; Carol is now doing underwater digital photography; Kitty taught herself GIS; Orla is cutting more shorts for Studio of the Sea, and Michel records and manipulates his own loops for the music in the movies.

During acting class Fred shot digital video of two short performances and in the evening we watched them. It was so all so natural; out of one wooden bench came a pelican case holding the projector, cords coiled out of a cabinet, speakers perched on the chart table and down from in front of the galley came the screen.

The theater pieces were about the evolution of human life from spinning atoms and monkeys into a bright future of interconnectivity. But for me the better theater took place later than night, when, sprawled out on the floor, we watched ourselves – on the gently wind-rippled screen – spring about, convulse, hoot and bang on drums. It was the techno-savvy chilling out, enjoying their aping of the analog age.

We can’t even pretend to be cavemen without inviting in the digital eye!


Postscript: Despite this technotopia, note that in the top photo attention is focused not on the screen but on a game of chess.

Circumnavigation

Jess just sent me this photo:

Voyage to Candidasa

I have arrived in Dili with no problems, and despite enjoying and embracing my time as a tourist, I am excited to be back in Timor Leste.

Before I write more about the ship and Bali, here are a few images from the voyage from Benoa to Candidasa. I have also added images to the Uluwatu and Ubud posts.

Left: Michel on the bow. Below: Eibes and Richard at the helm.





Below: Balinese fishing boats, laundry.