Parliamentary Elections Notes

The parliamentary elections are this weekend, and only recently has this fact jumped into focus. I spent Tuesday afternoon at a briefing for international observers at which representatives from UNMIT, UNDP, UNPOL, ISF, and IFES* all commented. Yesterday I visited four political rallies – FRETILIN, PD, PR and UNDERTIM – to take some photos.

So the last few days have been a press of facts and procedures, followed by the visceral thrill of crowds and flags, insults and promises. The campaign period now is officially over.

At the briefing, the speakers emphasized three major points:

First, rain. It has been raining almost daily in Timor-Leste (very unusual for this time of year), and the downpours have been significant enough to make important road impassable and knock out bridges. The biggest problems appear to be in the district of Covalima to the west, where access to the important Suai Town sub-district is now lost. Reports are still rolling in from across the country.

The rains create huge logistical challenges. For example, in the presidential elections the UN moved polling materials into 35 polling centers by helicopter. Following this wet spell, the urgent request for helicopter support to reach an additional 51, newly cut-off, sites have been issued, with 21 already approved. By the speaker’s estimation, 20% of all sites will now be serviced by helicopters. There is currently a big push to find new routes, scramble UN (M18) and ISF choppers, organize observers to fly with the materials, etc.



Second, the speakers underscored the redoubled need to build confidence in the counting process in light of the amended electoral law, which moved the counting process from the polling stations to district centers, effectively decreasing the number of counting sites from 708 to 13. The essential problem, as one official put it, is not the security of the ballots – the UN believes that sufficient steps are being taken to secure the movement of the ballot boxes – but the perception of their security.

For me this issue is a bit broader. In this election, it will be impossible to give the voter the same, unfiltered, experience of seeing his or her vote counted. The challenge is to develop procedures that can satisfy the minimum level of access and transparency that was established in the presidential elections – a high standard which now, for better or worse, shapes voters’ expectations and perceptions of legitimacy. As the UN Elections Certification Team stated in their seventh report: “It is unlikely that such a level of transparency [as established in the presidential elections], or quite possibly even a minimally acceptable level of transparency, will be able to be achieved at district counting” (my emphasis). There is a problem with not only perceptions, but potentially also with meeting basic international standards.

Finally, these elections are more complex and, considering the power of parliament relative to the presidency, more important than the presidential rounds. These are high stakes, high energy, and potentially high-risk elections. I am looking forward to Saturday.





* United Nation Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste, United Nations Development Program, International Stabilization Forces, and IFES (formerly International Foundation for Electoral Systems).

** While Timor-Leste has used the district counting system in the past, the problem in this cycle is “changing horses in midstream.”

*** From p. 7, paragraph 13. The UN Elections Certification Team goes on to call the amendment “a major retrograde step, substantially diminishing both the perceived and actual transparency of the counting process, and thereby running the risk of significantly compromising the main source of trust in the results.”

Hidden Kitchens

Some months ago I subscribed to a podcast out of National Public Radio by the culinary anthropologists/radio producers the Kitchen Sisters entitled Hidden Kitchens. They call the kitchen they profile “secret, unexpected, below the radar.”

For twenty weeks the shows jumped around. One week it would be taco trucks in Los Angeles; the next cooking on coal freighters on the Great Lakes; the next memories of a house restaurant that gave frequent respite to Martin Luther King during the Montgomery bus boycotts. In the end, however, the stories really weren’t about cooking or even food: they were about sustenance. Each hidden kitchen produced food for comfort and fulfillment, autonomy or companionship (lit: with bread), resistance and identity.

Food, cooking, and the intertwined concepts of sustenance and sustainability have been on my mind recently. During my time in Timor-Leste, I have had meals made for me twice a day, a system that I inherited from my predecessor and one that appreciated as I got my bearings. Starting about a week before I left for Darwin, I quietly slid out of the arrangement. I still have to sort this out formally with the woman who cooks, and I worry about how to do this politely and fairly.

Establishing a private life while living at my workplace has been difficult. And that’s why this small change has felt so good. It has made me feel less monitored and passive, more in control, and more connected to the what’s going on outside the compound’s swinging gates.

Back in my room I have been slowly building a hidden kitchen. Old ice cream containers holding flour and yellow cans of sweet lychee are now my bookends. I am accumulating spices, sauces and staples. My fridge is filling out. The Vegetarian left me teas. Goode and L sorted me out with a yogurt maker (which I proudly showed mom via the new webcam). I have now cultures multiplying, garlic pickling, avocados ripening and a pumpkin molding.

I arrived in Timor-Leste with the idea I would be leaving at the end of the year. I had an ascetic’s attitude of just waiting things out - I could find what I wanted once I got back home.

The choice to take another contract has sent me in search of sustainability, comfort and small pleasures. Instead of abstention, how do I cook up what I need? Some needs are social: being able to see friends and stay in touch with loved ones. Some are intellectual. And right now, a lot are corporeal: the rush of Vinyasa yoga or dancing or adding more bird’s eye chilies.


After dutifully eating my little plates of rice and sautéed greens delivered to my clean white room, it feels good to be growing a burbling, tiny kitchen on (and tucked under) what used to be my desk. I like when my bread dough rises and the stickiness of my knife and fingers after mincing garlic; I like that my room smells a little funky when I walk in; I like how food reconnects the brain with the gut and tongue. My hidden kitchen is both lab and experiment – one small, appliance-swooning step toward seeking out what I need to feel nourished, full.*



*Apparently part of the answer is liters and liters of yogurt. Lots to go around. iTunes users can find the free podcasts by searching for "Hidden Kitchens" in the iTunesStore.

Photo: Top – mangos from the courtyard, October 2006. Bottom – a meal delivered to my room.

Rolling Stones

I arrived back in Dili almost a week ago, touching down onto the small runway with a pang of reticence that had been entirely absent on my return from exile in Jakarta.

My holiday in the Northern Territory (NT) was wonderful. The blinking screens and thumping, shuddering air conditioners that occupy my days in Dili were replaced with wildfires, arching blue skies, and the scream of the Rolling Stones as I covered over one thousand kilometers with L in his bootstrapped 4WD.

I can’t get no… sat-tis-fact-ion…

NT felt huge and oddly empty compared to Timor. Camping out in ‘the bush,’ I kept expecting to wake up to see a line of curious children and walleyed goats sitting outside the tent. On the escarpment we drank the water from the streams because there isn’t anything up there to contaminate it – a new experience for me as in coastal Maine rainwater is no longer safe because of industrial pollution and in Vermont we worry about effluent.

All the sounds and little rituals of camping, for example the snap of tent poles coming together, set my thoughts rushing back: my petite dome tent in the Yukon-Kuskokwin delta of Alaska, tarps plastered with wet pine needles at Merck Forest, sharing the green Eureka tent with dad at the farm, etc. I spent a lot of time thinking about my summers growing up.

Despite the flush of nostalgia, there were parts of being in NT that felt totally foreign – crocodiles, for instance. Off the escarpment, there is no gadding about near the water’s edge, no trailing a foot or finger in the water. This took a while to internalize, and it was sometimes frustrating to reconcile my general confidence with my clear lack of NT-specific smarts. Lots to learn.

Amidst the euphoria of big landscapes and straight, smooth roads were smaller moments. I did a fair amount of bird watching (not really a lot of listing, though) and it felt good to get lost in the minutia of plumages, rendered close by my scope. As L said, they (the birds) don’t do much. And sometimes that is precisely the point. A long look at a new dove; drinking tea with Tasmanian honey; warming up on rocks after a swim – non-events that feel intimate.



Now back in Dili, it has not taken too long to reconnect with the people and things I love here. The markets are more full and beautiful than I have seen in months: the avocados have tight and glossy purple skins, and Timor’s stubby bananas and zaftig tomatoes make a mockery of stiff supermarket produce. I am back typing away about elections trivia, and I am already anticipating sorting through the inevitably (tantalizingly) convoluted results from the parliamentary election (30 June 2007).

There is something nice to coming back to my simple routine of passable coffee in the morning and a crossword puzzle before bed. However, that is not to say that I couldn’t have done with a few more weeks tromping around Kakadu National Park and drumming on the dashboard while yelling with the Stones:

… hey hey hey, that’s what I say… I can’t get no sat-tis-fact-ion!





Photos: From top to bottom - Kakadu; checking out the Forest Kingfishers in Kakadu; walk into Kakadu; White-bellied Sea Eagles throught the scope; calm waters in Litchfield; the group hiking into Kakadu; upstream from Yellow Waters.