ESSAY
SUSAN RUMNEY
Machete Latte
Another day at the beach. Groups of people are lying on the white sand, skin colours ranging from coconut-ice to boot-polish black. A bunch of guys are playing soccer with some local boys. Women in career suntans recline on sarongs, gold bangles clanking against mobile phones. On one side petite triangles of cloth push mounds of flesh together. On the other a single strip keeps the flesh apart. Local men walk five kilometres to stare at them from behind the low stone wall separating the beach from the road. Local women are nowhere to be seen. It could be anywhere in Southeast Asia.
Except that the beach on the right is called Bomb Beach. Fringed by shady trees, its half-moon sand is darkened by aqua water which is darkened in turn by the promise of coral just offshore. Not one footprint mars its pristine splendour. It is now out of bounds because a man was killed there last year when he stepped on an unexploded shell left behind by friendly military forces.
Except that the beach on the left is called Baby Beach. That’s the beach where men in uniform took babies and threw them into the water. Sometimes a mother can be seen there at dusk laying a wreath and praying.
Except that looming above the sun-worshippers is a fifty-foot statue of Jesus. The statue looks over the bay to Dili. Its arms are outstretched, as if to say, ‘I am the protector of all I see.’
Except that two years ago eighty per cent of Dili was sprayed with diesel and set alight with grenades.
I turn my back on the silhouetted hulk and look for a platoon of UN hunks bristling with muscles. I park myself right next to them. Safety is my prime concern. Internationals, particularly women, have lately become targets for machete attacks by local youths. However, the chance to indulge in some subtle voyeurism is also a factor in my choice. And when bronzed Portuguese pecs begin to pall, there is always the coral and tropical fish just offshore. And when the salt starts to burn and the sand to chafe, there is always a latte at that little café on the way back to town. The café on Baby Beach. Great place for sundowners.
Welcome to Dili, East Timor. Under the rule of the United Nations Transitional Administration.
Driving back from the beach in our bouncy new 4WD twin-cab, we pass East Timorese on foot. Most are tiny people. Dark-skinned, wavy hair and big white-toothed smiles. If they smile. A young guy catches my eye. I wonder if he will be one of our students at the university.
I wave at him. He replies by putting a single forefinger to his mouth. I keep looking, my hand now down by my side. He does it again. I do not know what it means but I know it was not friendly.
Most of the buildings we pass are still burnt-out two years after the Indonesians left, scorching the earth behind them. Oh, the money is there to rebuild. Problem is that all the land records were destroyed. The East Timorese now have to prove that their house belongs to them. The burnt shells usually hide a family living under plywood and tin humpies out the back. As you drive in from the airport, the first blackened ruin slaps you in the face, like a gap in the smile of a beautiful woman. But, as you drive on and discover that half the teeth are rotten or missing, numbness sets in.
Back at my hotel, I leave the clammy heat of midday to collapse on my bed under the clanking air conditioner. My room is one fifth of a converted forty-foot shipping container. I thought they were joking during the briefing session in Melbourne. But, yes, my shabby, smelly little rabbit hutch actually used to roll on the high seas. It is lined inside and out and contains a single bed, desk and cupboard. The only time it rocks now is when the couple next door find the energy to get amorous. With a dining room and communal showers, it is a bit like being in a mining camp. Some of my Australian colleagues at the university in Dili complain about the lack of privacy, the noise and having to wait their turn to use the toilet. Well, let’s face it, they are paying over forty dollars US a night. Most East Timorese would not make that kind of money in a month.
CIVPOL – the multinational Civilian Police force. They are everywhere. You eat Portuguese CIVPOL dust on the road out to the beaches. Straining speedos announce the nationality of the Brazilian CIVPOL somersaulting in front of you on the beach. Drunken Aussie CIVPOL snore lustily one thin wall away from your ear. North American CIVPOL jostle you for the last hash brown at breakfast. These guys and gals are keeping this country in order. And when they cannot take on a pack of two hundred machete-wielding villagers, the Peace Keeping Force steps in. And if they fail, there is always Xanana Gusmao who will fly in by helicopter and talk the villagers round.
It is five o’clock in the hotel beer-garden. I have been here two months now and I am privy to the hotel gossip. Angelica, a local girl behind the bar, is joking with a customer. I was told she was a ‘war bride’. War bride? Comfort woman? Tearing the euphemisms aside like cobwebs, I finally understand that she was systematically raped by Indonesian soldiers. She is one of the lucky ones. Her family have accepted her back into their fold. She also has a job. Over eighty per cent of East Timorese do not.
The careful application of cigarettes to various parts of the body was a form of torture used by the Indonesians. Two years after the Indonesians left, Rosita has fresh cigarette burns on her arm. Her East Timorese boyfriend took umbrage at the short skirts she started to wear to work at the hotel. He does not want his future wife influenced by the decadent habits of international guests. However, he does not complain when she steals cigarettes and beer for him. I have seen the hand-over of stolen goods and I know her days of employment are numbered.
The kitchen door opens and I catch a glimpse of Frederico. He is chopping up a chicken. I was told that he hacked the head off a militia man with a machete. He sometimes pops his head into the gym when I am working out. I think it amuses him to see a woman pumping iron.
The university I am teaching at is a headless body. The Indonesians had all the senior and administrative positions and when they fled they took or burnt everything – all the university records, textbooks, syllabi, desks, teaching materials. Everything. To fill the void, recently graduated men have been fast-tracked to professorial status. In class they teach without notes to students without texts, struggling to remember what they were taught two years ago. If they turn up to teach. I assumed that my absent local colleagues were lazy and uncommitted because they were so rarely seen at the university. It was weeks later that I found out that the UN bureaucracy had not paid them for four months and so they were moonlighting in other jobs to provide for their families. I wonder about my students. I examine their faces as though what is written there will provide me with the answers I seek. I ask a student her age. She looks about forty. ‘Twenty-five,’ she answers. I wonder what her eyes have seen. What her body has suffered. How many family members she has lost. I chat with another student. Only twenty-three but deep lines etch his cheeks and a knotted scar nudges his lip. He smiles politely at my joke but it does not take the glaze off his eyes. I turn to another student and start to ask a question but stop. I have learnt to identify a certain look and when to back off.
One of my colleagues asked his class, ‘So, who exactly were the militia?’ A student answered, ‘I was ... before.’ I know that some of them were freedom fighters. That some come from Baucau, some from Los Paulos and that there is fighting on the streets of Dili between gangs from these two towns. The challenge is to find English topics that will not press buttons. Topics that are culturally relevant. Most introductory topics in textbooks – family, houses, shopping, Western habits and hobbies, certain past tense exercises – are not. I decide that my students will become extremely proficient in the future tense. And to design my own course.
I want to give individual attention, to humanise this conveyor-belt teaching I am doing, but sometimes it is just impossible. Just under four hundred students cross the threshold to my classroom every week. Ten different classes, class sizes of fifty, one two-hour lesson per class per week of conversational English. One week between lessons. Up to fifty per cent of each lesson is spent revising what was taught the lesson before. Even so, I can ask a student, ‘How old are you?’ for the seventh week in a row and still not receive an answer. Absolute beginner? Post-traumatic shock syndrome? Extreme shyness? Who knows. My students range from being almost fluent to barely able to say a word in English. These students are the ones that did not pass the entrance exam to the university and, by causing civil disturbances, they coerced the university into creating a bridging course. At the end of my course, the students will resit the entrance exam. This is their second chance to make it to university. Consequently, to make it equitable I teach the same content at the same pace ten times a week. I peak at the fourth lesson and struggle to maintain professional integrity for the remainder.
It is at the campus when the full force of the scorched earth policy hits me. I start to feel a slow burn of hostility for the Indonesians responsible for this. Charred beams hang at crazy angles, their only grip on reality a ten-inch nail. Rubble is piled in corners. A battered staircase without banisters leads to a landing without railings. I step lightly going up the stairs and try to avoid rush hour. Our classrooms are soot-blackened and lack power, window panes and desks. The students sit on new blue plastic chairs. Often there are not enough chairs to go round and so students sit on window ledges or lean up against walls. Sometimes they peer in through windows or stand on tiptoe outside the door. Some come without pen and paper. Almost all come without lunch or water. During class, I struggle to remain coherent in the humidity and to throw my voice over the constant throb of generators and UN traffic. The students struggle to remain focused due to hunger, thirst and ongoing trauma in their lives.
Last Saturday the students rioted at the university. A military vehicle knocked a male student off his motorbike just outside the gates. The students wanted to bring their injured friend onto campus. All smiles and laughter. The UN guys insisted that the victim could not be moved until checked by ambulance officers. The smiles faded. The students erupted and the mob took over. Rocks were thrown. Heads were split open. Riot police charged. The students ran up to the second floor and threw everything they could find out the windows at the police. If there was anything to trash at the university, it would have been trashed. Fortunately, plastic chairs bounce but do not break. Another positive – rioting students are extremely efficient at clearing rubble from buildings.
I now wonder if my students could turn on me. The Rapid Response Unit was recently called to a high school to protect the teachers from their students. Students who had been failed in recent final exams, their chance to go on to university burnt as quickly as their houses two years ago, reacted instantly and violently. They threw rocks at their teachers and threatened to kill them. The unit hung around for three hours until the students dispersed.
University exams are two weeks away. The university has told me that I must fail two-thirds of my students in the exam. Only a third of them can go on to the university. This use of my exam as a culling device runs contrary to everything I have been trying to achieve in my lessons
– to promote a relaxed, enjoyable and trusting learning environment. I also worry about my safety during and after the exams. I express my fears to some CIVPOL mates. One gives me his personal mobile number. Calling the emergency CIVPOL number could be futile if the person who answers does not speak adequate English. My CIVPOL mates walk me through an escape plan. Nowhere on campus to lock yourself into? Campus surrounded by razor wire? One narrow entrance? OK, razor wire can be flattened and walked over. Grab a whiteboard and throw it over the razor wire surrounding the campus and escape into the Pakistani compound next door. No time to do that? Get in your 4WD and get the hell out. Drive over them if you have to. This is the advice I receive.
Some CIVPOL guys, just down from the hills, are devouring bloody steaks so large they droop off the plate. Still twitchy from facing a rioting mob, they drink heavily every night and slag off the locals, other nationalities and the UN. The locals are ‘primitive savages, CIVPOL from Africa are lazy bastards and the UN is woefully inefficient’. With six months down and six days to go, they say violence has always been a part of East Timorese life. Before the Indonesians, before the Japanese, before the Portuguese. UN folk, next post on from Bosnia and Somalia, say they’ve never known people to flash from laughter to murder so quickly. From smiles to machetes within seconds. Others explain that these are a traumatised people, raw from decades of brutality and repression. They just need time and to be set a good example by the UN.
There are some smiles at this statement. There have been reports of local women being raped by CIVPOL at a hotel in Dili. Female CIVPOL being sent to investigate sexual assaults in the enclave in West Timor must be accompanied by a male officer. To protect them from sexual assault by other CIVPOL. Someone makes the comment that even the goats are not safe in certain districts. Everyone knows the nationality of the CIVPOL unit under discussion. But this is the UN. The race card can be slapped down very quickly. Snap! Post-September 11, the religious card would be even quicker. So little is said and done. Culturally ruffled feathers are smoothed back down. Differing professional standards, work ethics and sexual preferences are reconciled under a big woolly UN blanket of overbudgeting and gagged mouths.
The locals are a lot friendlier out in the sticks, I am told. I take a trip to the Bobinara district with two colleagues and a spouse. Four hours to go one hundred and thirty kilometres. The roads are potholed, switchbacked and teeming with people, pigs and poultry. Our security notes tell us that if we meet with a car accident we need to assess the situation and consider whether it would be prudent to stop. Even splattering the tiniest chick could involve hours of negotiation and the eventual coughing up of a considerable sum of money. Human rights agencies have taught the East Timorese well. Not only the actual cost of the road-killed animal is calculated but also its future progeny. The last item on the security list informs us to stay calm if hijacked and try to negotiate the terms of release.
We stop at a coastal town right on the border. The town is a mess of UN and police vehicles, razor wire, checkpoints, a machine-gun tower, demountable buildings and a few locals in a dusty street. A battalion of Aussie soldiers are marching along the road with serious looking radios and Steyrs – bloody big guns with really nasty bullets that enter the size of a pea and exit the size of a watermelon, sucking out intestines and other organs as they pass. We drive to the border and have to stop the car about three hundred metres before it. Indonesians at the checkpoint are staring at us as we take our ‘gutsy tourist’ shots. I feel a bit uneasy. Like a kangaroo in the glare of a spotlight.
From there we bounce our way up into the mountains to Balibo where there has been some incident with a grenade recently. Nothing to do with the military on either side, I am told, just a local settling a score. In the middle of the town like some medieval fortress is HQ for the Aussie forces in that area. It is an old Portuguese fort and commands a 360-degree view of the surrounding countryside. A helicopter drones on the opposite rise. The town is still in ruins. Most houses are blackened and overgrown with dusty vegetation. Two men turn out of a side street and walk up the main road. They are unsmiling and haggard. We get out to take some photos of the fort. We notice a ruined house on the left. Through an open door, a wreath can be seen on the wall of the room inside. The two men are now standing outside. We go over and ask them about the wreath. They invite us in. On the floor beneath the wreath is a warped and peeling piece of board. Its faded handwriting proclaims a date, 1975, and a word ‘jornalisto’. We guess that this was the room where the five Aussie journalists were killed. Bullet holes can still be seen on the wall. In the heat of midday I feel cold.
One of the local men gestures to the black curtain hanging over a door to the right. He holds it open for me. I do not want to go inside. My throat tightens in a half-sob but I step through. Inside the small room there are five small coffins of different sizes, child-size, and again a wreath, and a notice saying something about dates 1999, in July and then again in August. I gather that five children had been killed in this room. The sob threatens to become fully-fledged. I look at the two Timorese men who want us to know, choose another language and whisper ‘Obrigado,’ and escape into the sunshine.
Next stop is a checkpoint and a car-search manned by nice young Aussie boys in camouflage paint and uniform, working from a row of similarly dressed tanks. I ask one if I can take a photo of him. I swear he would blush if he were not painted green. He shuffles and sort of nods. I get him in my sights. Say, ‘You don’ t have to smile’ and get a glimpse of some white teeth gleaming between green lips. Pretty easygoing bunch of guys. One of them rummages around my backpack. ‘What’s this then?’ he asks. ‘A parachute?’ I look up, worried. He holds up my mosquito net with a grin. I am glad he is not holding up a pair of my knickers.
On the Sunday we soak the dirt out of our skin in some hot springs built by the Portuguese over a hundred years ago. The stone changing-rooms are partial ruins. Real ruins. It is nice to float on your back in a warm pool in a valley and look up at mountains on four sides. However, I know the addition of sulphur fumes to my wardrobe will not improve the general ambience of the rabbit hutch.
Despite its proximity to the border and the grumbling of tank patrols, the town of Maliana appears serenely bucolic. Young children follow us, stand in groups and stare. Older people smile shyly, their examination of our clothing and car more subtle. Wherever the Aussie Peace Keeping Force patrols, whether by foot or tank, the locals wave and call out greetings. Young children hold out their hands to slap the hands of passing soldiers. At dusk, people walk along dusty tracks from the fields, heading for home. There is no menace in the machetes they carry. Ah, this is more like it. This is the East Timor we wanted to see. An innocent, victimised people, bravely getting on with their lives, humble, grateful for the help they are receiving from the international community.
Back to Dili. A race against the rapidly falling tropical sunset which has no understanding of the need to get off the roads before dark. A remote possibility of being carjacked niggles but the more imme-diate danger is from other vehicles travelling without lights. We have a leadfoot driving who manages to line up most of the potholes with the front tyres. A gentle nagging from the passenger seat outlining the dan-gers of travelling at one hundred kilometres an hour has gone unheed-ed for the second day. Soon the only sound in the car is the snap of seat belts locking at each bounce. I shift in my seat so a different part of my rib cage fields the impact.
Then it happens. We hit a trench and become airborne. We land in front of a cliff. At last Leadfoot removes his foot from the accelerator and hits the other pedal. The road grates tread off our tyres as we skid around the corner. Two CIVPOL vehicles are parked ahead. A group of people are sitting on the side of the road. We stop and follow their gaze. At the bottom of the cliff is a yellow bus whose brakes were not quite as sharp.
A change of driver. My colleague bounces Leadfoot’s head off the roof of the cab a few times and then continues at a sedate sixty kilometres per hour along snaky cliff roads. Deserted by the sun, our eyes start to twitch in their sockets to detect locals on unlit motorbikes. A glimpse of a vague silhouette in the glare of distant lights is often the only indication that we must share the road. Now I understand why all the reflector lights have been screwdrivered off our car by local boys.
We make Dili after dark. Held up on the bridge, my colleague is urged by Leadfoot to overtake. She resists. Minutes later we find out the reason for the delay. An overtaking car, driven by an international, has hit an old man. Passenger Seat is a nurse. She gets out to check on the guy. Hemmed in by cars, we start to fret. She returns. His pulse and pupils are OK. An ambulance has been called. An angry mob does not materialise. We get home safely. Passenger Seat thanks my colleague for her sensible driving and comments that she did not feel a moment’s anxiety. Leadfoot agrees wholeheartedly.
Friday night. Happy Hour at the United Nations Transitional Administration building. Waving aside mandarine boys selling fruit at twice the price back home, waving UN identity cards at men in white booths, internationals head for the bar. They stand around on a stretch of green grass knocking back subsidised beer and Jacob’s Creek chardonnay, discussing the night’s options. Dinner at City Cafe. After dinner, drinks at Timor Cafe. Dancing on the Amos. Aussie Rules by satellite at the Monkey Bar. Late night boozing at the Dili Club. Forget the disco at Oasis – too many attacks on internationals by locals outside lately. I stroll from group to group, listening in. Seems that the UN attracts monologists – there are an amazing number of people who seize a pet topic and refuse to loosen their grip for up to an hour. Some show remarkable active listening skills by searching for one word that relates to what they know, grabbing that word by the short and curlies, and not letting go until they have pulled them out by the roots. Others nod when you mention your area of expertise and then proceed to lecture you in that area. Consequently, I now know everything that needs to be known about the sinking of the Antelope in the Falklands war, how to snag a World Bank contract and the effects of first language interference on English for speakers of Indonesian.
My head saturated with information, dizzy with chardonnay, I head for the ladies’ toilet for some respite. On the wall is what looks like a condom vending machine except the condoms are all free. We have all heard the stories of the soldiers who tested HIV + and were sent home. I take one of the condoms and look at it. It looks like standard issue. No ribs for her pleasure, no extra thinness for his. Having counted over forty different nationalities here in Dili, I wonder if one size does fit all.
The end of the first day of exams. I sit in the beer garden relaying the events of the day to my CIVPOL mates, a litter of empty wine glasses and comfort food on the table in front of me. It was a debacle. The examination rooms had been double-booked. In a planned snatch and grab, the tape-recorders containing the listening test were simultaneously stolen by students. Both were ‘found’ an hour later. The listening tests continued. Students with limited English were now scoring one hundred per cent. Others, caught with the answers on scraps of paper, refused to hand them over. Some, openly defiant, talked throughout the exam. One young man looked up when I cautioned him and held my eyes with a stare as cold as the blade of a machete. Another refused to hand in his paper at the end of the exam and continued to scribble answers as his fellow students whooped their way out of the room.
But it was during the afternoon speaking tests that things really fell apart. Local staff, instructed by the university to ‘contain’ the students awaiting their speaking test in a huge ‘holding pen,’ left their posts after thirty minutes. The local security guard had not been seen since the students rioted several weeks before. The riot police did not return for their afternoon patrol. Unsupervised, mobs of students made their way to the testing room and loitered outside, laughing and yelling, banging on doors, tapping on windows and barging into the room every time the door opened to admit the next student. My colleague pushed through the melee to inform me she had abandoned her speaking tests. We looked out at my class, at their noses flattened against the glass, at their reddened eyes glaring back at us. And decided it would be prudent to continue.
It is Friday night again. Latino disco night on the Amos. Exam week is over. No riots. The exams have been marked. The results will be given out long after I have gone. My contract is over. I survived and am ready to party. Most of the people here have already been to Happy Hour at the UN headquarters and then out to dinner. By twelve, there are about a hundred internationals dancing salsa on the converted heliport of this container ship hotel. Bobbing nearby, lit up like Sydney Harbour Bridge, is the Floating Palace. In reality it is a tacky Thai tub, stinking of bilge, but at US$250 a night, only bigwigs get to stay in this hotel on water. Licking the salt off their margueritas on the foredeck, overlooking a shanty town one hundred and fifty metres away on shore, a group of internationals are talking about the UN.
‘It’s just a massive self-serving bureaucracy carrying a lot of dead wood who get paid an obscene amount of money to sit in five-star hotels and petrify themselves in tax free grog.’
‘Ah, come on. Look what they’ve achieved. Almost half the buildings destroyed two years ago are now livable again. That’s about 35000 houses!’
‘But what about the inefficiency? The waste of money? Come on, you drive a Tata. Who made the decision to equip the UN with those Indian heaps of shit? I reckon it should all be outsourced to private contractors. Get more done, and more cheaply.’ ‘Got into a taxi today. ‘UN no good’,’ says the driver. ‘Better than nothing, mate’, I say.’
‘Polio immunisation to practically all the villages. Doing a good job, I reckon.’
‘Go and tell that to the people here in Dili.’
‘We’re rubbing our wealth into the faces of the East Timorese. We are not consulting them enough. We’re just the new oppressors.’
‘You mean we’ve just created a handout mentality.’
‘Yeah, the locals demand what they want and then steal what they can’t demand and bully their way to get the rest.’
The conversation goes in circles. Over in the shanty town, an East Timorese is more succinct. Opposite the gangway to the tub is some graffiti on a wall.
‘UN – fuck you.’
SUZANNE RUMNEY is Tasmanian-born and has recently returned to the state after spending most of her working life overseas or interstate in a variety of positions in education, training and development.
Island, PO Box 210, Sandy Bay, Tasmania 7006 Australia
Ph: (03) 6226 2325 Fax: (03) 6226 2172
E-mail: island.magazine@utas.edu.au