Diak Malae rises again

It has been 5 years since I posted and much water has gone under the bridge since then.

I left my job in Dili and returned to my Department in Canberra. Leaving there, I went to AusAID, which became the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. I left there, thinking to retire, but found that retirement was a gig that was too hard for me. I haven't had one of those for a long time.

Plus Fidget has announced his intention to pursue an education in Melbourne. Or Canada. Or anywhere that is (a) expensive and (b) far away from his loving parents.

Just Add Water has had no water added for quite some time, and I think a return to Dili and its diving may do her the world of good. It's possible she could write 'colour pieces' for the new Timor Tourism initiative.

We've got about three weeks to pack the house and get it presentable for letting and it's panic stations already. I'll post as I get time, but everyone I speak on the phone says I sound excited and happy (subtext: for the first time in ages).

I am looking forward to the Dili morning sky.

A Dili miscellany.

I haven’t written for a while, largely due to work pressures but also thanks to no large focus.


So I’ve assembled a few small things, a bunch of verbal gewgaws.


Some Tetum expressions: oin midar (“sweet face”) translates to “smile”. “La halimar” (“not playing”) translates as “seriously” in the sense of “very” e.g. tasi bo’ot la halimar means “seriously big waves”. Oi-oin (face-facing) means “a variety”. Manas (“hot”) is fun. Rai manas (“hot land”) actually refers to hot weather, but if you are suffering from hot weather, you cannot say “hau manas”. That is either ungrammatical, or slang for “I’m crazy”. You can say “nia manas” (s/he hot) and that translates out straight into our English idiom of “She’s hot!”. Isin rua (“two bodies”) means pregnant; it’s a useful phrase in my office.


The deer who graze by the shore have vanished. I hope Christmas in July did not feature venison. The tents for the night time barbequers also all vanished one night, although the people did not. The wood and bamboo scaffolding round the statue of Jesus is no longer there. Unfortunately, it didn’t vanish. It was simply untied and pushed down the slope.


I see so many things that take my fancy here, it really is a different place. Last weekend, I was just wandering and a family invited me to sit down and have a drink with them. I smiled and declined, as they were drinking Coke and Fanta. Asking for tea might have been too much and asking for water may have been unhealthy, so it was easier to pretend I had somewhere to be rather than refuse hospitality. Nevertheless, it made me feel good.


For those who don’t know, Just Add Water is now a Dive Master, to add to her impressive list of credentials. Solves the problem of answering: “And what do you do here?”, although what she is currently doing is learning Tetum, an activity for which she hasn’t had time to date.


The dry season has started. No, it hasn’t. Yes, it has. No, it hasn’t. Yes, for the moment, it has.
Except it rained last night.


Work progresses, and I’m going to leave that description right there.

Update from the trenches

I haven’t written for a while, and this one really is just an update for those who are interested in personal happenings. It will be of less interest to those who read for an understanding of Timor-Leste.

I spent two weeks in Canberra. Subjectively, they were two of the coldest weeks I have ever spent and my normal clothing amounted to 5 layers, including thermals. Fidget was running around in shorts, a t-shirt and a hoodie. The hoodie was a fashion statement, he wears one in subzero temperatures and +30 degree temperatures. Naturally, just as I was about to come home I started to acclimatise.

Work has been crazy in any number of senses. We are at a key period and tension is running high. Our national (i.e. Timorese) management team in the office have been promoted or reshuffled and all are new to their jobs, which does not help, so the international advisors are working as change managers, have higher support requirements being placed on them and also are still trying to deliver on the original aims set in a somewhat different environment.

Tempers are not in short supply, but good tempers are.

I’m fielding a few job offers (or at least inquiries as to my availability) at the moment, here and elsewhere. Just Add Water has noted that diving facilities will be a key criterion in determining acceptability – one of the options fares rather poorly in that regard. And Three Strokes would reverse-disinherit me if I tried to go somewhere a little dubious. Like Afghanistan, Iraq or Pakistan. So places like that aren’t on the list. Although I am told that the hazards are somewhat overstated.

The dry season has arrived at last. Only no-one has told the weather, so the rainfall this week has been torrential.

Just Add Water is still in Australia and will be for a few more days. She’ll be thoroughly dehydrated by the time she gets back. And she acclimatised to Canberra’s cold awfully quickly, so I suspect she’ll be suffering a bit when she gets back.

I’ll try to get out for more Timor colour, but I appear to be working 7 day, 90 hour weeks at the moment.

A picture is worth a thousand words…

...but sometimes even that is not enough.

I was walking to work, and the sky was spectacular. Even that is too weak a word. Across a pale azure ceiling, someone had thickly spread a swathe of glowing lava, with a palette knife half the width of the sky. It was sharp edged, entirely artificial and gloriously natural.

Blessed are the early risers. We have already inherited the earth.

I think the air is alive.

I work in an office with 10 women. Two are currently pregnant, one gave birth 6 weeks ago (and has now been back at work for a fortnight) and I suspect one more is starting to show. Two are grandmothers and may be largely past childbearing age, although I wouldn’t be laying any money down.

Four are unaccountably not pregnant.

At least visibly.

Today.

When success is failure, and failure success.

We were talking the other day about the quandary that faces most serious developers of capacity in any culture which has had long term aid programs. Decades of well meaning (I shan’t enter that debate) intervention often leads, not to a nation developing a robust system of responsibility, accountability and bedrock bureaucratic competence, but instead a disempowering of national staff in the face of international expertise.

Very often, the better the technician, the worse the capacity builder.

Of course, there are real traps here, because perverse incentives get built in. For national staff, while there is an advisor to take work off your hands if it is not up to standard, it is easier and safer not to do it well and push both the effort and the risk of failure onto the advisor. With a never-ending stream of advisors and a philosophy that seems common amongst agencies to ‘churn’ advisors, no one is there long enough to catch on. Or they are incapable of allowing failure. Or maybe they even play along too.

So what happens when the rules change? The advisor, hired nominally to build capacity, actually attempts to do so. She folds her arms and says “Not good enough, do it again. Or don’t. I am not going to do it for you, so I advise you to do better, for your own sake.” If she is alert enough, she won’t be fooled by a quite alarming number of strategies coming forward to shake her position, including stealthy resubmission of basically unchanged work, attempts to have other advisors take over the work, appeals to deadlines, appeals to urgency, appeals to friendship etc.

That is when failure can happen. If she has judged matters well, the failure will be painful but not fatal, and the errors will not relate to mission-critical work. She will not be popular, and the blamestorming will be intense. The failure may work well enough to shake up some entrenched dependent behaviours. Of course it needs to be supplemented by support mechanisms (for the very people vituperating her) and development strategies.

If she misjudges either the people or the situation, she may be sacked. Despite forcing a capacity build, she will almost certainly be endangering any extension of her capacity building contract.

No wonder some take the easy path of doing all the work and bemoaning the inability/incapacity of national staff. The system reinforces dependencies, institutes a round-robin of reports proving those dependencies and shores up the position of aid agencies abroad.

The rewards to nationals of taking responsibility are unclear and often uncertain. We are not looking to incentivise the system, and the perverse results remain.

This post is more asking the questions than proffering answers. I’m not trying to offend aid agencies – I work to one that is serious about trying to develop capacity, not just pay lip service to the concept. I just wish there was more consciousness of this and less reliance on systems and methods that seem to have such a poor track record.

In the meantime, my arms are crossed. My national friends can – and will – do better and will be better off for it.

I hope they eventually forgive me.

Limpeja, round 3.

Dili’s emu parade is still on, with the President exhorting the UN and diplomatic agencies and non-government organisations to join in. About the only group not included in his call is the unemployed who would probably leap at the chance if offered a couple of bucks and a brush every week.

He wants the place to be clean and tidy, “like Singapore”. Some malae fairly acidly observe that the problem is not in the cleanup, the problem is the littering that immediately follows.

If Ramos-Horta seriously wants the place to be as clean as Singapore, maybe he needs to take a leaf out of Lee Kuan Yew’s book – make littering illegal, make the penalties both severe (stiff fines) and humiliating (caning) and enforce them.

Medical doctors often prefer to attack the disease rather than treat the symptoms.

Just sayin’.

In the meantime, Friday morning should be a relaxing stroll with a broom or a bag.