Easter

From the northeast United States, where I grew up the cycles of light and dark, equinox to longest days, and snow to mud followed the same contours of the Germanic world where Christianity, born of deserts, appropriated the tannenbaum and yoked the resurrection of Christ to the unbeatable joy of discarding jackets. My dictionary, which references St. Bede (c. 700), tells me that the holiday’s name comes from Eostre, a Germanic goddess of spring.

On Friday, after a half-day on Thursday, I headed off with Mustang and almost a dozen others to visit Jaco Island, which sits off the Eastern tip of Timor-Leste. Over a year since my last visit, the road down from Tutuala has been dramatically improved and a tidy eco-lodge closely resembling those on Atauro has sprung up.

While many devout Timorese walked the hot roads in Good Friday processions, one group blocking the main thoroughfare between Dili and Baucau for over an hour, my holiday took its cues from the pagans. Upon arrival, Mustang and I slid into the clear water and were in and out as the full moon – a naturalistic facet of Easter that makes it a “movable feast” – rose over Jaco. The following night I won an arm wrestling contest and then slept on the beach covered in sand.

It felt good to get out of Dili and camp out, to stay up too late and wash my face in the sea. And even if here there isn’t the same exultation of winter’s demise, we came to Jaco at what at close of a long rainy season. The skies were clear, seas calm, and hills still green – it was a promise of diving and hiking and biking to work; of planting a garden and, for a friend, fresh hope that the slugs would soon leave his bok choy alone.  In the cycles of wet and dry that give Timor its rhythm, it is Easter that marks the beginning of a new year.

Driven

I dropped my father off at the airport on Sunday after five weeks of rolling around Dili and neo-hippie-watching, emulating, in Ubud. Before he flew we decided to head down to Tasi Tolu* to check out the new statue of João Paulo II and the reportedly $7 million road leading to his bronze feet.

The statue sits on top the last little peak of the ridge line that curves around the three salty ponds – fused now with the season’s rains into two – that give the area its name. The Pope is about a quarter the height of Cristo Rei, and with his confounding-ly boxy body, petite head and lower perch, he lacks the Rio-of-Asia oomph of his savior just visible to the east. Unfinished, when we visited the bronze likeness wore a sash of blue tarp, its face obscured with a white plastic bag.

Up atop the next small peak, in the white sunlight of midday, we squinted west as an Anteater truck unload sludge into the treatment ponds, scanned north to the reef at Dili rock, Atauro, and then looked east to the cemetery above Mustang’s house and over to the fuzz of smoke indicating the center of Dili. Shots from the firing range below went pop pop pop as we talked about what the weather would be like back home, summers at the farm. Nothing much.



Back at the bottom of the hill, with a bit more time to kill, we turned off into the National Peace Park/sometime horse racing venue.

To our surprise we were not the only ones to whom it had occurred that it was the perfect time to go for a slow drive on Tasi Tolu’s dirt racetrack. There were two other sedans, a 4WD, and a few motorbikes, all cautiously taxing counter-clockwise around the hippodrome.

And it was Dad who put it together. We had turned off into a grassroots driving school. Women sat behind the wheel of each sedan. On the bikes, she came before he. It was, incidentally, International Women’s Day, and we were witnessing practical and patient teaching and learning.

It really got me. Really hit me. In the last few months I’ve been involved in a handful of meetings and workshops about gender and gender-based violence that left me feeling frustrated and my Tetun leaden. One session had opened with a surreal condemnation of women for spreading laundry out on shrubbery to dry; what women need, the speaker opined, was training about caring for the environment. And then here at Tasi Tolu were people who were doing this liberating thing. Not prompted, funded or brow-beaten.

And it also spoke to what, in conversations with my mother, we call the “hole-puncher or leadership” debate: in trainings at my former workplace there was both an abstract discussion of leadership and a demonstration of how to line up a hole puncher in the center of page. Which did more? How does change happen? What helps?

I liked the driving school for its hole-puncher immediacy. And I liked it for the tenderness, or at least patience and open-mindedness, that I projected onto each instructor who was giving up his clear-skied Sunday.

Leaving the park on our way to the airport Dad reminded me that I too had learned to drive in a National Park – on Plum Island to be exact – where sitting next to him in the Silver Slug I had been pulled over and admonished, to my absolute fear and contrition, by a park cop for driving underage. At the airport we did a quick goodbye, after which I drove home, thinking about how it would be without him making off-color political commentary from the seat beside me at work or asleep and snoring on the floor in Balide by 8:30 PM, the generator roaring just outside.



* I have never felt more virtuous going through a roadblock. Police officer: “Ba ne’ebe?” Kate: “We are going to look at the pope statue.”

Long-lining

Note: This is our first shot at tag-team blogging!

The jukung is an impossibly narrow vessel with two bamboo outriggers and a lateen rigged sail (a rig swiped by the popular Alcort Sunfish). The fishing fleet trolls while under sail using a 100 m long-line, similar, on a smaller scale, to the sword-boat in Junger’s The Perfect Storm.

The long-line, with hooks dangling at 1 m intervals is attached to a 10 m leader. When you feel some action on the line, which is wrapped around knee and foot, the boatman wiggles the line to snag as many fish as possible, un-clips the long-line from the leader and then pulls the line in hand-over-hand while paying it back into the water - all the while dodging the flashing hooks.

The mackerel just came up suspended from the line like chromed parts in an automobile assembly plant. Clip the line back onto the leader, pay it swiftly out hand-over-hand, and the process starts all over again. We caught a few fish, not the hundreds that get pulled in on a good day, but at least we made our way back with something in hand.

The fishing fleet of jukungs from several neighboring villages was enormous. The boats dotted the gray horizon like butterflies – a brightly colored regatta with spinnakers flying.

Coming about is quite an event. The jukung heads downwind, and then, in a controlled jibe, the boatman cartwheels the boom over the gaff, bounces the gaff over the mast, and then pulls the sail down onto a new tack.



The curious thing is that, with the exception of the color scheme of the sails and two varieties of outboard, the boats were, to our eyes, identical. Does the jukung represent the apex of technology for this environment (wind conditions, range, catch, etc.)? Or, are the are the boatmen locked into a one-design tradition, unable to innovate or explore new materials? And, if so, what reinforces this conservatism?

I think of lobstering communities off the coast of Maine, as well as of Balint’s study Troubled Waters and her description of the debt burdens carried by Rotinese fisherman who owed the “boss” for fuel and equipment. The cliché is that necessity is the mother of invention; need, debt, and poverty, however, are not.

So, again, why not pay out two lines instead of one? Why not bait?

Our sense is that the people have other priorities. The jukung works just fine and under a wide variety of conditions. Why take the risk when there are fish to catch and a family to feed and a life to live just above the subsistence level?

The catch was modest, but it did make a contribution to the morning’s haul, which was quickly gathered and sorted by the women waiting on shore. As we headed out of town, bound for Ubud, we were passed by a fleet of wide-bodied motorbikes, each with towers of elegant open weave baskets packed with 10 inch mackerel, rushing off to market in Klungkung.

Back in Ubud

In the last few days Dad and I have covered a lot of ground in the Suzuki Fungus-Mobile (eww, see left).

Out east to Amed for diving and fishing.
Thought rice paddies to the base of the mother volcano: Gunung Agung.

Where, against the advice of everyone we spoke with, we attempted a 2 AM assault of the summit - all 3,000 freezing, socked-in meters. Failing to reach the top, and back at the bottom, we agreed that it was a stupid idea, but damn, we were glad to have hauled outselves most of the way up. Still muddy, we drove to Ubud, and are back in the swirl of jazz, internet, yogis and street life.



Photos: Road between Amlapura and Amed.

Bali High

Dad and I have decamped to Ubud.

Doing the yoga-detox-decompression routine after another hairy period in Dili. Dad is smitten with Bali, and when I make favorable comparisons to Timor-Leste he tells me I have Stockholm Syndrome. But I am in not mood to argue. Too zen. Off to yoga.

Looking Back

While people have been searching out the latest news, trying to figure out what exactly happened on Monday, I spent that evening sitting on my porch with my father re-reading the Commission of Inquiry (COI)* report that described the events of April and May 2006, looking for a way to better understand Major Alfredo Reinado.

The report told me surprisingly little about Reinado or his politics. And that in itself challenged his media epithet of “author of the crisis.” According to the report, he mobilized his small faction of military police and PNTL members only on 3 May 2006, well after the initial complaints were lodged in February and the protests underway in April. His strength seems to have come not from early leadership, but, instead, from after the breakdown of order and the into crisis’s aftermath.

I went out with a Swedish radio journalist as a fixer yesterday, and we spoke with friends and a colleague of mine who introduced us to his neighbors at the small IDP camp where he has lived for almost 22 months. Translating allowed me to ask, indirectly, deniably (He is wondering why…), the basic questions that are taboo, impolite, or seem too stupid to query as someone who has been here for a while. (Why do you still live here? How do you feel about the Major’s death? Are you angry? Pleased?)

In the interview, my friend described Reinado as the key to the crisis.* I agree, but with a caveat. This makes sense, particularly after looking at the COI and recent ICG reports, only of the events of April-May 2006 – arguably a crisis of weak security institutions – are separated from the more recent IDP crisis – a crisis of fear, regionalism, property, and popular confidence. Put another way, a crisis of institutions precipitated a second crisis of intra- and inter-community conflict and prolonged internal displacement. While Reinado fought prominently in the first crisis, it is Reinado’s threat and what he may still symbolize that prevents the resolution of the second, according to my friend.

Reinado has been a fixture of Dili unrest for the duration of my time in Timor-Leste – escaping from Becora prison a few days before my arrival (30 Aug) in a silver taxi (or so the reports said). He was already a myth by then, and he soon gave shape and voice to the anger of some western youth. As time passed he became a part of the political landscape, shaking things up from the hills but never descending. He was up there, making threats and making DVDs, but never perceptibly moving closer to or father from the negotiating table or Dili.

One of the journalist’s opening questions was “Were you surprised when you heard the news on Monday?” Like each person he spoke to, my answer is yes. I think that I had started to believe, as some Timorese do, that powerful leaders are protected by magic. Reinado escaped the ISF, and Ramos-Horta and Gusmão are survivors. Perhaps the president believed it too as he decided to walk towards, not away, from the gunfire. So yes, I was surprised that this happened and surprised by the death and injury.

Maybe what I should have taken from the COI report was not facts about Reinado, but the larger lesson of fragility. Timor-Leste is a place, where, on a Monday morning, a former military leader could launch a dual assassination attempt, wound the president and end up shot right above the eye.




* There is a link to this report in the sidebar under "Reliable Sources."

** This view is clearly not shared by the author of a recent report on the displacement in Timor-Leste. For a different perspective, please see this report out of the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Center.

Unfolding News

As has been reported widely, Dili has remained calm following the coordinated assassination attempt against the president and prime minister of Timor-Leste. The best coverage - in terms of laying out a time-line - that I have read has come from Paul Toohey of The Australian.

I have been surprised by the calm in Dili, and my coworker described it as born from the realization of Reinado's supporters that the Major was wrong, that he went too far. The word we used was "moe" or ashamed. Even if this is incorrect, my colleague was reaching to explain the feeling of weight (and wait), not bristling anger, that now marks Dili's streets.

I am fine, as is my father. We're keeping our heads down, and we both are hoping for JRH's speedy recovery.