metinaro camp

locally-designed kitchens

Following the troubles in Dili, thousands of IDPs fled from the city out to the districts and one of the places they have congregated in is opposite the F-FDTL training camp in Metinaro. There're about 7000 IDPs living in a huge piece of land, and like in Dili, the area is now dotted with hundreds of white UNHCR tents. But because you can't cook inside the tents, the IDPs have taken to using local materials to build their 'dapur' or kitchen with palm fronds and sticks.

Paper toilet
filing cabinet

Bathrooms constructed out of whatever materials the IDPs could find... the one above is made out of used UNHCR boxes, while the more sophisticated maroon-coloured bathroom is actually made out of FILES! Yes, i dunno where they got them, but someone made sure that they were all of the same colour! And why are they not using the copious amounts of tarpaulin distributed by aid agencies? Apparently - according to a source - some supplies had gone missing under the management of a previous team of volunteers who are IDPs at the camp. Since then they have been replaced with a new team of volunteers whom i saw putting up tents (donated by PLAN intl) for the doctors who visit everyday.

At the camp, i met a young man called Santiago. he spoke good english and was a university student at the UNTL until the crisis. He lived in Becora - where my place was! - and had fled to Metinaro after he was attacked three times. It was really sad hearing him speak of how his neighbours and friends whom he had grown up with attacked him during the height of the emergency - he is so confused - like so many others - he doesn't know why he was attacked and who manipulated others to turn on their friends and neighbours - he wants to come back to Dili but is fearful. He told me that he still believes it's not an ethnic clash but a political struggle gone awry. He said there are 'westerners' too living in the Metinaro camp but nobody harms them or targets them...

this is what Timor now needs to look at - peacebuilding. How to restore respect for one another? since returning, i read Kirsty Sword's "A Woman of Independence" and was saddened by how everything she and Xanana had wished then was not to be now. She had quoted Xanana as saying that once Timor was independent, there would be no more violence and bloodshed in this country. I am now reading John Taylor's book on Timor's history too - and again, during the struggle for independence, the resistance fighters had stressed that violence would end only with independence and on the contrary, the Indons had said that an indie east Timor would be a destabilising force and might spiral into civil unrest. HOW IRONIC is this? and how sad....