June 8 – Austrian Red Cross, USAID, Food, and Ruth Kimball

Today started with a very productive meeting with Cristoph Blaimschein from the Austrian Red Cross.  Apparently the International Red Cross/Red Crescent has divided Timor-Leste in half, with the Austrian branch developing water and sanitation projects in the Western half and the Australian Red Cross developing projects in the Eastern half.  We not only were able to finally get access to the 2010 census we have been trying to get, but got some data on recent projects done and the name of a man who apparently has a spreadsheet of every WATSAN project done over the last ten years – hopefully he is willing to share!  (Update from later – the database is not as comprehensive as we were led to believe, but should be very helpful if we learn how to access it.  Anyone know how to run a .accdb program?)  Christoph gave us some great info, and it looks like we will be visiting the Suco (think county) of Hatolia in Ermera to actually see one of the projects they are developing.       
      

The Red Cross seems to take a great approach to developing these projects.  The biggest problem with WATSAN interventions is sustainability.  Without community buy-in the project will usually no longer be functional after just a couple of months, either because it was not maintained or the people didn’t understand the benefits and took it apart for the materials.  First, the Red Cross only builds water projects that use gravity, so there are no pumps to break and no need for electricity.  The water is brought from a higher elevation down to the community, which works great because Timor is so mountainous.  Second, each four-person technical team that helps with the training and building is Timorese, with a team leader, technician, and two volunteers.  Not only does this get locals involved, but people are more apt to listen to their fellow countrymen.             

The four person teams do not do all of the work either, but use motivated groups from the community, usually 30-50 people but sometimes as many as 200, that learn while they make the project, so they can maintain it themselves after.  These community groups are also usually 30-50% women, which is great because women are in charge of gathering water, so their input is important.  This community ownership makes it so the project will likely last for years, but monitoring of completed projects is extremely difficult.  Community buy-in is really the most important thing for the long-term success of water and sanitation projects – without it, they will either not get used or fall into disrepair.              

There were a couple things that did not make sense to me though.  First, I thought there would be more ongoing monitoring and evaluation of completed projects by the Red Cross to make sure that they are still working.  The other is that the sanitation projects uses septic tanks and there are no plans to empty them.  Apparently, when one is full they just build another, something that has not had to happen yet.             

Christoph also told us about something that the Red Cross does not do, but apparently is getting more common and is used by UNICEF.  This is called Community Led Total Sanitation – CLTS; an awareness program to show people why proper hygiene and sanitation is important.  Apparently what is done is they give someone in the audience a glass of water, and tell them to take a drink.  Afterwards, they take a piece of hair, and run it through feces and then dip it in the water, and tell them to drink again.  Obviously they don’t (I hope), but it is supposed to be a shock factor, basically “this is why you should wash your hands”.  Sounds gross, but probably effective, we’ll see.            

 We also met a man named Ryder Rogers from USAID.  He was not able to give us a lot of information, but invited us on a day trip to Laclubar in Manatutu district to see both a completed and incomplete project.  It sounds great to me, so now we will be going to four districts instead of three – Ermera, Aileu, Manatutu, and Baucau.             

We are starting to get some really good data from the people we are meeting; I just hope that we are as successful once we get to the field.

 My Tetum vocabulary is improving as well.  Here are some new words I’ve learned recently:

Nasi: rice

Babi: noodles

Mie: noodles (not really sure the difference between those two)

Los: very/ a lot

Sapi: goat

Ayam: chicken

Sop: soup

Basikala (Indonesian, another important language here): very good

Cosar: sweat

Ikan: fish

Sosis: sausage (which basically means hot dogs)

Telur: egg

Russa (Indonesian): Broken

So How cosar los would mean I’m sweating a lot.  As you can see, most words I’m learning either have to do with food, sweating, money, or pictures.  The food here is pretty good, but the spices are a lot different than what I am used to – interesting, but in some cases not something I would necessarily order in the future.  Sometimes things can also get very spicy as in hot, but that is usually your own doing – at dinner I just put three different kinds of hot spices on my nasi goreng special and thought I was going to die.  Nasi goreng is a good fried rice dish, usually with a meat in it.  One place we went that meat happened to be cut up hot dogs.  Babi goreng is similar, but noodles.  We have been going to a lot of little local places, and every meal is literally between $1 and $3, so for three of us (with bottles of water) we haven’t had to pay more than $9 for a meal.  The one exception was OMB or One More Bar, an ex-pat Australian place we went the first day.  Honestly, I didn’t think the food was as good as the hole-in-the-wall places, but it was at least three times as expensive. 

Today we had a really tasty fish at lunch called Trevally with rice, some sort of pickled tomatoes, and a collard-greens like substance called Cassava leaves.  Pretty bitter, but tasty (I didn’t really like the tomatoes).  Yesterday there was a soup (I thought bland, but it was probably the restaurant, not the dish) called Gado-Gado.  I’ve been having a really fun time trying all of these new dishes, sometimes with good results, sometimes with bad.  There’s also a lot of good fruit juice around – guava, papaya, mango, etc. 

 One of PVAs former students, a woman named Ruth Kimball, met us at the hotel this evening after taking a helicopter in from one of the districts called Manufahi.  The helicopter took 20 minutes, which is great because by car it’s more than six hours.  It’s amazing that a country can be so hard to drive around when its so small, but I guess that’s how bad the roads are.  She works for an EU agency doing monitoring and evaluation for agriculture projects in the district and has been here since 2008 – but what she really loves is youth development.

 We went with her to a small NGO called Movemento Criancas Unidas or Movement of Adolescents and Children she has been volunteering at and saw a bunch of little kids that did a couple of songs and dances for us, she said they always get really excited when foreigners come to visit.  I have a couple of videos of it, including one of PVA trying to teach them the walk like an Egyptian dance, but there is no way I’ll be able to upload it on this internet connection.  Bear cub and I were not looking forward to going, but I’m really glad we did, it was a great experience. 

She seemed like an incredibly brave person.  She came to Timor-Leste because she wanted to see a Southeast Asian country with no plans on what she was going to do here, found a job and never really left.  She did Peace Corps after graduating from DU in 2004 and has only spent about 2 weeks in the USA since then.  We’re hoping we can go to a fundraiser dinner for her NGO on the 23rd when we get back from the districts.  Not only that, but she speaks Tetum, Spanish, and Portuguese.  It’s great to see someone with so much passion; I hope she can find a paying job doing youth development; it seems like what she should do.  I really hope that I find something after Peace Corps that I am as passionate about as she is with her work. 

Christoph Blaimschein from the Austrian Red Cross

Ryder Rogers from USAID

Lunch with Trevally fish

The kids dancing at MCA

Us all crowded into the back of a Malaysian guy named Wilson's Jeep leaving MCA and going to dinner.  That's right, Ruth is on PVAs lap.  He said no to me. 

June 7 – Timorese Entrepreneurs, UNICEF, and La’o Hamutuk

I always thought that roosters crowed once at dawn, I was wrong.  It’s really hard to sleep in (past six) because of it.  That’s right, there are chickens and roosters all over Dili, the capital.  The economy in Timor-Leste is awful; there are basically no jobs for anyone, which makes everyone an entrepreneur.  You can’t go anywhere without seeing people walking with dead chickens, fruit, or drinks that they are trying to sell you. 

To be a taxi driver in Dili is to be an artist.  I have literally only seen one traffic light in the entire city so far; at the other intersections every car, truck, and motorbike follows the same basic rule – honk your horn and keep your eyes open.  These taxi drivers go through the city at a pretty good clip, only slowing down (slightly) when going through an intersection or over a part of the road where the pavement is bad (which is a lot of the time).  To block the sun and because all of the drivers are too short for it to bother them, the top half of every windshield is completely blacked out.  There are no traffic lanes in Dili.  Drivers usually stay to the left side of the road, unless there is someone to pass… or bad pavement… or people walking… really, they kind of stay to the left.  The typical fair gives them about $3 for a crosstown trip, and when you consider that gas is over $5 a gallon, that miniscule amount shrinks even more.  Traffic in Dili is like a dance, only far more intricate and with more partners than any dance that I’ve ever seen. 

I’ve also found that we are terribly unlucky when it comes to taxis.  We spent a lot of the day walking around parts of Dili, and the entire time the empty cabs were honking at us, usually a few a minute.  I’m presuming it’s because we’re white and stick out like sore thumbs.  It’s become incredibly annoying.  I mean, they all drive yellow cars that say taxi, it’s not as if they are hard to spot.  If I want a cab, I’ll let you know, I don’t need you honking at me.  Of course, as soon as we want a cab, which has been about four times so far, there is no empty one to be found.  Bano said it was probably because I’m so big they think I am going to break their car, which is not really out of the question when you get into some of them.  I never thought the taxi that brought us to the embassy was going to make it; it sputtered and groaned the entire drive with the trunk continually popping open.

According to Ambassador Fergin, there are only about 46,000 real, paying jobs in the country, and those are all with the government, IGOs and NGOs.  Everyone else is either a subsistence farmer or, more likely, an entrepreneur.  Considering more than 15,000 people get added to the workforce every year, it is a daunting task for a developing economy to try to create jobs for all of these people.  One of the most visible jobs is selling fruit, fish, soda, calling cards, or anything else you would want to buy on the side of the road.  There are tons of tiny stores all over the place, most of which sell everything from timing belts to power adapters to frozen hotdogs.  I swear, motorcycle parts and maintenance has got to be one of the biggest industries on the island – everyone drives one, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a store that didn’t sell parts.  There are even huge groups of people that go to one of the main rivers to collect sand and rock to be used in construction.  Security is also a pretty big industry.  Since there aren’t really any jobs in the country, people make their own.  Today we had a couple of meetings, one very productive, one not so much.  The first was with Caesar Hall, the chief of WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) for UNICEF.  He was really friendly and knowledgeable, giving us a great overview of the WASH situation in the country.  Apparently UNICEF works mostly in the districts, not Dili, and they are focusing on five or six main ones right now.  We will be going to two of those, Ermera and Aileu, both of which he promised to send us more information on. 

He gave us a lot of great info while we were there too and I took copious amounts of notes.  You probably won’t be interested in most of them, but a couple of figures you might be.  Right now it seems like in the urban areas around 80% of people have safe drinking water (a figure which sounds high to me, and the man I talked to later), while that number is about 55% in the rural areas.  Sanitation is another thing.  In rural areas, only about 26% have safe sanitation.  A lot of times this is because people just don’t know the benefits of it.  Caesar joked that in some communities, if a toilet is built the only time it gets used is when a foreigner or government official comes to see if it is working. 

The second meeting was with a man named Charlie Schneider who started the NGO La’o Hamutuk, which means, “walking together” in Tetum.  I guess it was started by people who had supported Timorese independence and wanted to help the fledgling nation as well.  This guy had some interesting ideas, but seemed to have lost perspective a bit.  As Bear Cub (Grant) later said, he can’t see the forest through the trees.  He has been in the country about 11 years, and had grown cynical of every person and organization trying to help it. 

Having been there so long, he did have some interesting ideas though, with his visiting friend John Miller from the East Timor and Indonesian Action Network (ETAN) jumping in every so often.  The first was that while they may have the ability to get clean water to people, so many pipes in Dili had been damaged, either accidentally or purposefully, that the groundwater seeps in and the clean water becomes contaminated.  From walking around the city and seeing broken pipes in a lot of places, that makes sense. 

The second he illustrated with an anecdote and basically said that you have to get the community involved.  Apparently an NGO went to a town that had part of it on a lower elevation by a stream and the other part on a higher elevation by another drinking source.  Unfortunately, the stream occasionally dries up, so an NGO built a water system to bring water from the upper elevation during those times.  Unfortunately, they didn’t bring the community in on this plan.  When the US Ambassador was brought to see the achievement, the pipes had been destroyed because the upper elevation community thought they lower one was stealing their water. 

The last idea was that men usually don’t care about the problems with getting the water.  Women are responsible for this and must walk the sometime several kilometers to get it and then bring it back, so they must be brought into the process.  These last few ideas made sense to me, but also seemed like common sense.  Of course involve the community, of course involve women, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t – but I am sure there will be things I don’t think of in my career as well.  He also predicted that by 2023 Timor-Leste would be entirely out of oil, their Sovereign Wealth Fund (set up with the expert help of Norway) will be empty, and unemployment will double.  Within two years the nation will owe more than $20 billion.  Considering they have a yearly budget of $1 billion and owe very little now, I don’t see how that is possible. 

I just tried water cleaned with purification tablets for the first time.  Luckily I had the neutralization tablets to try and make it taste normal again – though those are nowhere near 100% effective.  I can still buy water out here, but thought it might be a little more economical to try using the tablets too, we’ll see how long I keep that up.  We tried going to the government ministry in charge of water, but had no luck, I guess it is some sort of holiday.  It will have to wait until we get back.  I heard Denver has been having some crazy weather, looks like I left just in time!  

UNICEF WASH Chief Caesar Hall giving us the rundown.  If you look at the cards behind him, you can see some of the problems in the sector. 

Me outside of UNICEF after meeting with him

Outside the UN compound, a man cleaning the gutters that are all over the place

Charlie Schenider of La'o Hamutuk - or is that one Bob Ross?  Note his catastrophic graphs behind him. 

To get to most of the shops by our hotel, you have to cross these rather rickety looking bridges that go over putrid smelling, open sewers.  I can understand how the clean water gets contaminated.