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.
Like the pictures-that guy does look like Bob Ross!
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