Category: Work
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The six-month slump
I’m about a week shy of six months of living in Timor-Leste, but I’m delighted to share I’ve continued my childhood tradition of being a total overachiever and have hit the dreaded expat six-month slump about a month ahead of schedule. I was warned about this before I left Australia, and have since had friends…
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Mine’s bigger than yours
In Batara last weekend for a work field trip, I got talking to one of the few other foreigners in the village: a newly arrived business student, who’s completing a three-month-long internship in Dili. She’d landed last week, she told me; then, in the same breath, observed that Timor was very different from what she’d…
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Photo essay: Behau field trip
Last week, RAEBIA hosted a group of participants at our resource centre in Behau, Manatuto, for a field trip that was part of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation’s climate change conference. UNFAO showed conference delegates examples of work that local communities are doing to fight the effects of climate change – at RAEBIA’s…
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Photo essay: Hera tara bandu
Last week I attended a tara bandu ceremony in Hera, a village about 30 minutes out of Dili, with some colleagues from work and our office’s trusty old camera. Tara bandu is a traditional ceremony that regulates how land can be used and imposes punishment for breaking the rules. My NGO, RAEBIA, uses it to enshrine regulations…
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Everyday life in Dili
Whenever someone I know goes away, this bad habit I have of romanticising whatever it is I think they’re doing kicks in like clockwork. Whether it’s a mate backpacking Sri Lanka or an old colleague holed up in a Singaporean skyscraper, I immediately – and jealously – decide that they’re yammering fluently in an exotic-sounding language…
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Careering
I’m sitting in a linen-covered chair in the conference room of Timor’s fanciest hotel, listening to an American accent in a suit explain to me and 50 members of Dili’s agricultural industry the considerations required in shaping pesticide law, thinking, “how on earth did I get here?” (Not literally: my boss picked me up from home…
Sophie Rai Liur 