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.”