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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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Top and bottom 10, month #3
My ten favourite things about living in Dili, at the end of my third month here: Dancing so hard I split my jeans Home-delivered vegetables Tetun idioms Cooking dates Finding things less hard the second time Booking flights to Bali Booking flights to Bali in Tetun (!) Lunch invitations from the cool girls A friend…
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Are you an expat or an immigrant?
For three months I’ve been calling myself an expat without thinking about it. That’s what it means to be a foreigner working abroad, right? Not necessarily. Today, I read this great post on Fabulous Fusions, quoting this BBC article, which made me pause for the first time and consider what I really should be calling…
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My favourite Tetun words
A smart friend told me recently she loves learning Tetun because language is instructive of culture, and you can learn a lot about a culture from the words it has for certain things and the ones it leaves unnamed. English, for example, language of neurotics, has the different words think, wonder, stress, worry, worried, remember, pity,…
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More power
Picture this. You live in a society that uses electric power. One day, your house senses you’ve used too much energy, and that your allocated stock is running low. It sends you a warning. You respond immediately, and walk to the front of your house to receive a code, which you then punch into the…
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Trade expectations for gratitude
A hokey piece of internet wisdom I came across last week: trade expectations for gratitude. I very likely saw it hand-lettered on a pastel Instagram post. #wisdom However jejune its philosophic depth may be, the quote stuck with me as I navigated an exhausting week. I toyed with, and liked, the relatively high bar it set:…
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“Can you speak Tetun yet?”
A question I had reading the later entries of expat blogs before I left Australia, and something I thought about this morning, feeling teary and helpless on a microlet, bleating deskulpa hau la komprende – I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I’ve been living in Dili for three months now – the first filled with daily four-hour-long…
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How I spent a weekend at home
After finishing Live Below the Line last week, I was looking forward to a slower weekend – one where eating banana-peanut butter toast would feel as thrilling as getting out of Dili for a dive trip. There’s not a coral reef as beautiful as banana and peanut butter in my eyes On Saturday, I slept…
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Unspectacular but adequate
Today I came across a poem called Prayer, by Helen Mort, which begins: Give us good days Days unspectacular but adequate The weather neither calm nor wild Your coat zipped nearly to the top That fourth line stuck with me, and I turned it in my head as I reflected – of course – on…
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Why I ate on $1 a day
Most of you would know that this week, I’ve been taking part in Live Below the Line – a fundraising campaign that challenges participants to eat on the Australian equivalent of the extreme poverty line. In Timor-Leste, that’s 88 US cents per day. It’s something I’ve taken part in annually for the last six years…
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Sophie Rai Liur 