June 10 – The Road to Ermera

After driving on Timorese roads, I am no longer afraid of any mountain roads in Colorado, guardrails or not.  Our driver, a-Jay, is a 19-year-old maniac.  On roads I wouldn’t dare to drive more than 20 mph on, he was going 45.  The roads all have people going each way, even though they would be considered one-way roads by American standards, at best.  At one point, there were four vehicles on this narrow strip of road; one going towards Dili while another truck, a motorcycle, and ours went the other way.  The roads are considered paved, but in most places the paving is maybe 3 feet across with huge potholes.  Our SUV had no shocks, and we would bottom out every 30 seconds.  At some points even a-Jay would only drive 2 mph because the road was so bad, with potholes a full foot deep.  Meanwhile, on either side is mountainous jungle, with steep drop-offs on one side the whole way.  The mountains may not be the height of the rockies, but that doesn’t make them any less deadly. 

There was more than one time I thought that either we would die or we would kill someone else – maybe by going off the road, maybe by a head-on collision.  While driving, we didn’t just have to worry about the other cars in the road, but people walking on either side the whole way.  Our translator, John, threw up at least four times. 

Finally, after a few hours we made it to Gleno, the largest city in Ermea.  We continued on to Santa Bakhita after that, a small mountain town.  This place is absolutely incredible.  As I said before, Ermera is the coffee growing district.  Every tiny house had coffee beans drying out front.  We were able to make it to a place where we met an Australian named Jim who was able to hook us up with rooms for the next couple of nights.  He is here for about a month once a year helping with solar panels and things for the rather impressive clinic/English-learning center that they have.  Everyone in the community is so friendly.  After only two hours here we had spent an hour and a half talking to Jim and eating lunch, learning about his work here and the water system they have in place, 25 minutes putting our stuff down, and the other five minutes was spent finding the Suco (county) Chief.  Five was enough, he was more than willing to help and spoke to us for almost 2 hours. 

I won’t go into a lot of detail about the water systems, but I do want to say that everyone in the community has been working to improve them, usually through volunteering.  They have been working on a gravity system to bring water from a spring 20 km away, digging ditches to put pipes in the dirt, with only a couple of paid people and more than 100 volunteers.  Meanwhile, they are trying to harvest, husk, dry, and roast their coffee crops.  Through the work of USAID, the CCT, which means Timorese Coffee Cooperative, comes and buys their beans and what they think is a fairly reasonable price - $1.50 per kilo.  Seems like a low amount to me for how labor intensive the work is, but still better than before. 

I don’t have time to write more now, but I’ll try to tonight.  I have just been so exhausted after our work everyday that trying to write sounds terrible. Plus I don’t want to push my luck with our little wireless Internet thing.