One and half Million $ to SAME, Public Offices in DILI Almost out of Service

Superb activity in SAME almost paralyzes most of the public services here in DILI. One and half million dollar was allotted for the co-celebration of 100 of revolt in SAME along with 28^th November known as proclamation of Independence.

That was a kind of policy trend, which was aimed to allow public in Timor Leste to participate the event that organized by the government. Therefore, no matter public services are running or not, boasting on the success of the celebration is the important thing than public interest. 

November is one of historical months for the country, more public holidays are expected.  Tolerancia do Ponto means, the day before or even the day after national holiday, public offices are advised to tolerate staffs' absence. What a public management!.

It is no longer bizarre to find a public office is just left a cleaner behind to keep the office while the others like chiefs, directors, professional staffs, administration and finance officers are gone for the activity whether in DILI or in the district. From 24^th – 30^th November public attention will be in SAME because of one and half million has been sent beforehand.

Cheers

BUILD TODAY - ABANDON TOMORROW.

Since the freedom of Timor Leste, the influx of foreigners to Timor Leste is quite substantial. Let’s remember the range of missions at the time until now, such as UNAMET – UNTAET until to the current, and hopefully will be the last mission - UNMIT in December this year. Those missions employed thousands of employees, and had poured millions of dollar that sprayed as well to local economy in Timor Leste generally and DILI particularly. Presence of those people from the mission has fostered tourism activities. Foreign business Men built hotels, restaurants, resorts, apartment and all those related services that foreigners could use and pay. 

To take advantage of those missions, locals have created sort of initiative to sell goods, create small yard of recreational areas and some other small businesses. The beginning of the foreigners' flock is a capstone in the tourism development. That is because the culture of traveling they carry with them. To respond this culture ,there is a need for a complementary effort. One is locals have started the businesses, whereas government is demanded to facilitate this start by creating everything needed so that locals can keep attracting foreign tourists despite UN mission is going to end. 

Stakeholder of government says, number of tourists visiting Timor Leste is increasing, so we need to build facilities for that. Yet, I don’t find any source mentioning whether the rise of tourist is a flock of people that attracted by specific places, events in Timor Leste (DILI), or the rise is just a coincidence of the UN’s missions?. We want a more sustainable development in the tourism sector, not like today’s trend is BUILD today and ABANDON tomorrow.  

If you are noticed by the northern coast piecemeal tourism development, from Dili to eastern – Dili to western, there is a new view which small houses were lined up in some spots. From these new views, particularly from Dili to Lospalos, you would think that stakeholder from government has done a lot of things to facilitate the sector moving ahead. 

But, I don’t really understand how those projects were planned. Eventually, projects never give a good signal of improvement compare to the original from 1999 as far as I observed in many places in average. Forget in DILI and let’s see picture below here, “a small roof is housing a group of teenagers in BEHAU”. The place is called one dollar beach according to the locals around I asked. I still remember how crowd this place was. In the past, I could see predominantly white people were there to swim and dry the body up from the heat. It used to be no such small roof but it was very crowd, vice versa things are made available but useless.

Since this small roofed house is started to built up, I regularly give an eye, and think shortly about the progress of this project when I travel to my hometown. The project has been taking time like a major project, no finishing until now. Vivid result, it is temporarily no longer used by its planned users, travelers from Dili to eastern districts utilize the place for resting area instead. They tend to even destroy the facility by throwing trash everywhere. Another horrible view is that goats are also using the place as resting area.

Project of building those roofed tents does not even improve the place. The way I look this picture is what I saw in Dili, where location for fish market is abandoned, traditional market is abandoned so on and so forth. Again BUILD today – ABANDON tomorrow. 

When UN withdraws, who will be housed under this small roofed tents?. It's a big question mark anyway. I meant since we do not have substantial number of tourists to visit those recreational places which are located far away from the capital (Dili), we should think wisely of spending money. A good example of this is, I told before, like aforementioned project. There is no urgency to build this kind of infrastructure or any related facilities. We will develop every place we think potential for tourists. But it needs demand. When there is a demand - there is a supply. We have to adopt this simple theory in order to become cost effective builders. Otherwise the more money we spend there more blur the result will be.

Hope this gives you an inspiration

One paragraph to this year’s 12th November despite belated

12^th November massacre just passed few days ago, commemorating this day has been a culture since 2000 for public to put the work on hold as to honor those who have sacrificed their own live. At least, give them a honor because they are no longer enjoy the sweet of independence from that time on. Who alive, liable to make Santa Cruzers’ dream come true by freeing people from every severe improvable condition such as hunger, disease, illiteracy, poverty, so on and so forth. It needs time definitely, however, slow but sure on our own feet we will attain that dream someday. 

Blessing...

Souls’ Day

Soul’s day is one of the important days in the Catholic tradition. In Timor Leste, visiting home village where grand parents and relatives were buried is a very common holiday visit. It is believed that pray for them, giving them a-love-full sweet flowers, lightening their way with candles, and any other rite is to show our sense of loss which we have lost them in real world. According to the tradition, if you do so, you will be blessed and refrained from calamities in your life.  

Most of Timorese are now moving from city to rural, and some are vice versa, come across people from center of Timor Leste “Dili” to West, to East, to South and some are staying during this long weekend. Government released a public holiday for government offices, maybe Dili is quite calm now, less crowd that refresh the air before hectic day on Monday.

Blessing...

A concert at Timor Plaza

The more you listen to music the more you are inspired, and your soul feels happy when you listen and watch live performance of a group of band in your home town. That is what I did last week, where I became a spectator of a group of people performed a music stage at Timor Plaza. It was last week, just posted here because no time to write. It was an enjoyable second time visit to the most luxury public area in Dili. The place (Timor Plaza) is really expats’ for shopping and eating because locals as I saw them walking around mostly sightseeing and collecting information how to safe money to buy electronic devices at Timor Plaza because for me, those staffs are unaffordable, and for many of the locals as well. At least, take advantage of the place to enjoy the air condition in such a big indoor open space, though buy nothing. Anyway, this is not the topic of this writing, so let’s go back to the original track.

Act of Congress, that is the name of an American Band performed at Timor Plaza last week. If you see some of the corners in the city, you might bump banner hanging on across the ceiling of the road you pass by. It is part of the advertisement where I was also notified through that means to come to the concert venue at Timor Plaza. I did not know the group existence in America, whether they are famous such as MTV's stars or not. That is not an issue at all to hold me back to watch their performance at Timor Plaza. It was entertaining definitely. 

I did not know all of the songs they brought, except RADIOHEAD’s song titled “High and Dry”. I really memorized the ref of it “Don’t leave me Dry”. At least the song makes me muttering sometimes to get into the ref. The song was my favorite when I was in Bandung, we sometimes played the song in the music studio along with my colleagues happened live together in a rent house. 

The band performed at Timor Plaza was quite modest. They did not play music with heavy and complicated instruments. I like the concept which resemble to acoustic with light songs that make the spectators feel happy. I did expect them to sing more songs as I was so excited to see them, but no, few minutes after I arrived there, they announced to close the concert with three more songs. 

I looked around, not many people were there. Most spectators are locals, and few are foreigners. I guess foreigners are from the US embassy whom organized the event. Some are on same floor with the stage and some are on the second floor. I happened on the second floor where I could see over people but unfortunately I could not hear the sound system clearly. 

To document my presence, I took out my camera and snapped few photos of the Band as well as spectators. I liked a guitar player’s style, he played acoustic guitar so softly when He plays melodies of the song. On the other side, I saw a woman carrying violin while backing the singer up to make the song perfectly sound. Although, I like two players in that group, I don’t want to take side in taking photos, I zoomed out the object and took the whole stage included all players appeared in the photo.