6 Weeks in....lets talk about poverty

We are finally settling into Lospalos and life here- which is challenge on a day to day basis for a pampered westerner like me. Hot and sticky most of time, noisey all of the time…chickens, dogs, pigs, children, everyone shouts…but not as noisy as Dili because so much less traffic..

Things don’t work, electricity and water go off, you can’t buy a lot of goods we would normally be used to,- bread, butter , cheese, eco washing liquid…. doing the washing is a mission even with a plastic washing machine which you have to fill up and empty by hand, then spin clothes out one item by one item as the barrel gets easily unbalanced and stops spinning. The plumbing is a strange affair that requires a complex series of turning on switches, pumps and pipes before you can have a shower.

The house is palatial with so many rooms that we don’t need…..and we live outside on the balcony as despite having lots of small rooms it does not have a living room. But if you can live with the mosquitos thats ok. I have started doing yoga and meditation in the mornings out there at 6am and this is my favourite part of the day, misty up in the trees, and reasonably quiet(if you don’t count the chickens). We have a family to the right who have pigs and we give them our food scrapes, the landlord’s family live behind us, again in a very small house but with electricity and running water. And the house to the left has many children……

We are living in this house with a huge balcony outside.

I want you to carefully look at this image. The space in front of the house is where up to 10 children and babies play every day… a tree for shade, a little bench to sit on and further back a low table that sometimes the baby is put on under a mosquito net. The house has no roof in the front portion as this is the room where the cooking happens over an open fire fuelled by wood. Every morning and evening smoke rises up from here and billows out across the road. But this house is actually home to two families, the one with 5 children (all under 7 I would say) live in the front and another family live at the back- and that family cooks in a lean to attached to the back of the house. As far as I can make out at the back in the garden area is a tin shack that is probably a toilet the many people use.

Washing clothes happens in a series of buckets outside. The woman who lives here is married to a policeman. The average wage in Timor is less than $150 a month…..and yet the children appear so happy and can amuse themselves all day long playing easily with each other, looking after the baby, amusing themselves with sticks and a ball made out of old rags and the odd toy they have.

Not all houses are as challenging as this one, but a lot are. And it is confronting to be living right next door to them and having so much. Yet I guess this is how it is the world over- even in NZ- but in NZ we don’t have to look at this disparity every day. We can easily turn a blind eye.

A walk down the road….more typical homes…

Note the satellite dish…we all love to watch TV!

Every second child in Timor is stunted- I feel like a giant here! People eat lots of rice and the poorest eat little nutritional food- all those chickens but none are corralled and fenced off so you can collect the eggs. Of course there are lots of programmes here to address this but still I see the impact daily. Schooling is expensive and going on to higher education even more so.

There is very high unemployment here. And I have never been anywhere with so many children and youth…an old person is a rarity, again another impact of the conflict. 60% of the population is under 25. An entire generation wiped out and now a huge baby boom.

If they can, people make money by doing what our landlord has done- build a flash big house right on top of your own house and rent it out to foreigners to make a decent income, while your family lives in a tiny space with many people. I still have not decided how many people live behind us…..it seems like a lot and here we are , rattling around in this large property. I wonder what they think of us foreigners living as we do? Confronting my own guilt is part of the process of being here. And realising that I do not need all the things I have back home as much as I thought I did.

This all makes me more determined to do my best here and offer what I can……and that is another story as work has begun in a challenging way…but more of that in the next post!