Tag: Timor-Leste
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My first Easter in Timor
As an aetheist out-of-nest-er, I’ve had the last two Easters away from my family, and both times I’ve leveraged the long weekend for something slightly departed from reflection and penance (my sincerest apologies to my Catholic grandparents for that). I spent this weekend at Atauro Island – heading right to the dock from our house…
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A weekend at Atauro
When I came to Timor on a work trip in October 2016, I visited Atauro Island – a palm-fringed oasis, all wooden canoes on glassy seas and fresh-cut coconuts and tiny pocketed mountain villages and rat-rat-rat tuk tuks on dusty empty roads. As I sat at the back of the boat on the return trip…
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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…
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What surprised me about Dili
In a few months’ time, as I head into the introspective slump apparently inevitable for volunteers here, I could forget everything I found quirky, exciting and energising about my first few weeks in Dili. So, to safeguard – and to gently remind myself, in one or two or three years’ time, when I’m reflecting on…
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“Where do you find your friends?”
Before I moved to Timor, I obsessively read the blogs of every Dili expat I could find, searching for answers to the mountain of tiny stupid questions that my fears about leaving were throwing up in my mind. Here are five of the dumbest questions I had before I moved, and my best attempts at…
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New grooves
If not quite a routine, I feel this week like I’m starting to fall into a rhythm here in Dili. Every morning, I wake up underneath my mosquito net to the roosters outside my window. My alarm joins the noise – I snooze it, of course – and I drag myself into the shower just…
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A post about politics
Tomorrow, Timor holds its fourth-ever presidential election. In a quirk of timing this self-confessed politics nut was thrilled with, my first month in Timor coincides with both the presidential election and my home state’s own election: last weekend, Western Australia had a state election I watched very closely from Timor, desperately refreshing live blogs on…
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A busy Dili day
A quick update from what’s suddenly becoming a very busy week. We started Tetun classes at the Dili Institute of Technology yesterday, and will continue with four hours of morning class every weekday for the next month. This week and next we also have induction activities at the AVI office in the afternoons – more…
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A weekend in between
Between our arrival in Dili on Thursday, and beginning our language classes on Monday, we have nearly four days of time that, with the exception of a few short orientation activities, is completely our own. It’s unnerving for me having free time in a new place, particularly when I don’t really know what’s available to…
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24 hours in Timor
I touched down in Dili just before 7am yesterday – my early morning Air North flight the third and final in the journey that has taken me from inner-city Melbourne life to my new gig living and working as an Australian volunteer in Timor-Leste’s capital. While certain things about those two situations are similar –…
Sophie Rai Liur 