The country no-one wants
Fledgling Timor-Leste is trying to make its own way in the world. But neither the Pacific nor the Asian community of nations seems willing to welcome it. Laura Walters reports.
Clouds of red earth billow as we wind along the unpaved roads of TimorLeste’s Ermera district. Locals walking to school, work and market cover their faces; turning from the dust.
Shacks and modest houses line the pothole-ridden roads. Next to the houses lie tarpaulins with piles of coffee beans drying in the sun. The bigger the pile, the more substantial the house. More land means more beans, and more money from the harvest.
We pull up in a sub-village of the Hatugau village. A pile of beans lies drying next to a bamboo house. A woman leans against the doorless frame, looking out.
The beans don’t belong to Lorentina Soares – she doesn’t own any land. She harvests coffee for other villagers, making an average of $4.60 a day. It’s back-breaking, and she believes it’s the reason for her multiple miscarriages. Soares, a grandmother, says she’s 54, but her face tells the story of someone who’s lived much longer.
Timor-Leste is wedged between Australia and Indonesia. The Portuguese colonised the country, also known as East Timor, occupying it for more than 400 years. In 1974, the Portuguese colonies furthest from Lisbon were set adrift. Fretilin, a pro-independence force, took over in 1975, but nine days later, Indonesia invaded.
It occupied Timor-Leste until the country officially gained independence in 2002. But prior to the independence ballot in 1999, the Indonesian military conducted Operation Clean Sweep, a three-week campaign causing mass displacement, destroying most of the country’s, and the capital’s, infrastructure. About 280,000 people were displaced or forcibly removed.
Since then, the nation has largely faded from view. But it still desperately needs help.
New Zealand has supported Timor-Leste since 1999 – first through peacekeeping troops, and now aid. In 2018, New Zealand will invest $16.7 million in aid and development – 6 per cent of the total aid budget.
Attention is now fixed on the Asia-Pacific region due to increased trade, population growth, and geopolitical rivalries. This puts Timor-Leste in a strategically significant position. Its new government, which took control in July, wants to join a series of member groups. It’s aiming to join Asean, the Pacific Islands Forum, and now the Commonwealth. So far, it’s a member of none.
Technically, the country of 1.2 million people falls is in SouthEast Asia.
But New Zealand’s ambassador to Timor-Leste, Vicki Poole, says it shares many similarities with the Pacific; language and culture, size, and development challenges.
‘‘But their future is SouthEast Asia; it’s becoming a member of Asean . . . It’s going to be where the economic growth is, it’s where the future opportunities will be.’’
Before Timor-Leste can look to the future, it needs to rebuild. The scars of conflict cover the country. The average life expectancy is 69, the adult literacy rate is 58.3 per cent (compared to New Zealand’s 99), and more than half the population is stunted due to malnutrition. The poverty rate has improved but remained high at 41.8 per cent in 2014.
Soares sits in a plastic picnic chair on the dirt floor of her house. She cradles her sleeping grandson, while daughter-in-law Virginia Meko feeds her fourmonth-old baby, Augusta.
Meko squeezes her breast to get out any milk she can. As soon as she finishes feeding, Augusta puts her fingers in her mouth and starts sucking.
The family eats what they can grow on their small plot of allocated land: cassava, taro, sweet potato and banana. If they have some money, they buy rice. If they don’t, they take out loans.
Soares doesn’t own the small shack, with the rusting iron roof. And they don’t have any savings, just debt. Their story is repeated in various forms by almost everyone we meet in Ermera district.
When she’s asked what she wants for her children, and her grandchildren, Soares pauses and half-smiles: ‘‘That they’re not like us.’’
Timor-Leste isn’t a poor country, thanks to offshore petroleum. But oil production is declining.
The country’s gross national income is a little under $3 billion, but that money is largely spent on government infrastructure projects, and rarely touches the country’s 70 per cent rural population. This has led to a strong push for economic diversification.
New Zealand now invests $5m (31 per cent) in economic diversification. But a recent evaluation of the Timor-Leste programme says investments are dissipated.
As part of a refocus, New Zealand has been helping communities in mountainous regions farm fish in ponds to give them another source of income, and much-needed protein. It’s also helping farmers with agricultural practices, and introducing high-value crops like cocoa. The first cocoa samples were recently shipped to New Zealand for testing.
Other projects include
helping Timor-Leste build a regulatory framework for its emerging tourism market. And helping about 15,000 arabica coffee farmers improve the quality and quantity of their yield.
Coffee is the country’s largest industry, after oil and remittances. Most coffee growers who own land earn between US$500 ($750) and US$1000 ($1500) a year.
For a quarter of the population, coffee is the main source of income. But farmers like Soares have money for only three months of the year, during the harvest.
Local barista Mario Amaral says over the years the quality has slipped, dragging prices down. Poor roads, difficult terrain, water, and a lack of understanding of things like pruning have all affected the industry. Coffee exports dropped from US$23m ($35m) in 2016 to US$14m ($21m) in 2017, due largely to a drier-than-usual season.
About a dozen kids between 3 and 5 sit in the open-air community centre; barefoot, and crossed-leg on a tarpaulin.
‘‘Hello!’’ says the facilitator. ‘‘Hi!’’ chorus the kids.
Only 22 per cent of the country’s children attend preschool. Preschools are clustered in urban centres, with some municipalities having as little as 10 per cent enrolment. As a result, most children enter grade one without going to preschool, making them prone to repeating grades, and eventually dropping out.
The Unicef community preschool runs a few hours a day, three days a week. It’s a cheaper alternative to the Government’s state preschools. They’re also supported under the New Zealand Government’s $6.8m knowledge, skills and training development grant.
Unicef Timor-Leste representative Valerie Taton says they try to put the schools in areas of greatest need.
The organisation is hoping to get government support for the community preschools, because when governments don’t invest in early childhood education, they spend up to 30 per cent more on health, and primary and secondary education.
Three days of the week, subvillage chief Ernest de Deus walks around the village, poking his head in doorways, and stopping at coffee plantations to gather up wayward tots. He walks hand-in-hand with them to the preschool.
The 45-year-old went to school for a couple of years as a child, but when the war came his only option was to walk an hour to school in Letefoho village. In 1999, like many Timorese, he was forced to flee to the mountains. When he returned, the village was burnt to the ground. Like many villagers, he cut bamboo to erect makeshift shelters until help arrived.
De Deus and his wife, Madelena, lost two of their six children. One died of malnutrition in 1999. When he speaks of his four children, and their schooling, he smiles. One is studying in the capital, Dili.
De Deus says he didn’t make any specific promises during his election campaign, but he did say he would work hard to make community life better.
On a track in another small Hatugau subvillage, we bump into Anarosa Soares de Jesus, 12, who has a five-litre plastic jerry can in each hand. During the dry season, she collects water twice a day for her family.
Children here also collect water for their school. The junior school hasn’t had water for four years. A small amount runs to the tank at the senior school, but doesn’t make it to the taps or toilets before leaking into the ground.
When the government built the school it installed toilet blocks and a tank. But there wasn’t enough pressure, and the small pipes have fallen victim to tree roots. Now the tank sits empty, and the squat toilets are smeared with faeces from the past week.
Once a week a group of children walk three hours to the spring to collect water. It’s poured into buckets, or basins next to the toilets, with what’s left used to clean the filthy toilet blocks.
Joao Adison Tapel, 13, is one of the children who walks an hour and a half in each direction to help collect water. He says they desperately need water. He and his classmates are often thirsty.
Unicef is currently working with the sub-village, and community mobiliser Eteivino Menezes, to fix the water problem once and for all.
Menezes says they’ve found a bore 10 minutes walk from the school. They’ll put in a new tank, and a new piping system, and the school should have water by October. Hopefully, this is the last new water system the school will ever need.
Earlier this year, TimorLeste’s country classification status came up for review. It currently sits among the least developed countries. On an income basis, it’s been eligible to graduate to a middle-income country since 2015, but high rates of malnutrition, illiteracy, child mortality, and poor school enrolment figures mean the UN committee did not recommend moving it and it must wait until 2021 to be considered again.
For now, it still needs the world’s help. Poole says if it can harness its natural resources, and strategic position, it could be poised for huge economic growth thanks to the massive youth population.
Young people cover Dili’s streets, play football at the beach, run up the steps of the city’s massive Cristo Rei statue, zoom around on scooters, or loiter about.
Almost 70 per cent of Timorese are under 30; many have not had access to education, and they’re under-employed. For every 20,000 young people, there are just 2000 jobs. A large, underemployed youth population can lead to discontent.
‘‘Those risks that are absolutely still there, around a tipping point where youth are bored and could start getting up to mischief, there’s no doubt that’s on the cards, and Government needs to be aware of that – parents need to be aware of that. But so far, in fact, it hasn’t been the big problem that it might,’’ Poole says.
If Timor-Leste can harness its post-conflict baby boom, the population will be an economic opportunity.
Taton talks about TimorLeste as a country full of possibilities. But so often something seems to stands in its way. Locals talk of ‘‘the Heineken experience’’. In 2015, Indonesian beer brand Bintang – owned by Heineken – built a factory in Timor-Leste. Locals knew profits would go offshore, but supported the opportunity for the creation of 1000 jobs. When it came to the interviewing process, locals lacked the skills to fill the positions.
‘‘This is a small country, which also makes things possible,’’ Taton says. ‘‘I’m not saying that it’s not a complex country . . . but it’s feasible, it’s achievable.’’
Unicef New Zealand paid for flights to Timor Leste for reporter Laura Walters and visual journalist Abigail Dougherty.