Dili and the road to Los Palos
The ride into Dili was like a strange Malawian homecoming. It is eerie how similar to Malawi this place is; folks sitting under tiny wooden shack-like structures selling soap and cigarettes, bicycles zipping one way and mini-buses crammed so full that people are hanging out of the doors and windows and sitting on the roof zipping the other way. There are chickens and dogs and shacks, and old women with buckets on their heads, and men with fish and bananas slung over their shoulders and all I could think was "I've been here before."
Then you starting getting into town and you start to see the burnt out buildings, the shattered glass, the piles of tin, and the smoldering rubbage. It's then that you start to realize how bad things got here. We passed tanks and troops from all over the world, barbed-wire-surrounded compounds guarded by more bunkers and machine guns, blown up hotels, and a downtown without a single shop left untouched by fire and graffiti. It is estimated that as much as 70% to 80% of the country's infrastructure has been completely destroyed.
I had about a half an hour at the IRC house in Dili to meet the country director and a few of the other IRC folks, grab some lunch, a small supply of food and a mosquito net, before hopping on a truck loaded up with corn nuts for the medical mission in Los Palos. It's a five-hour drive by truck to Los Palos, and Carlito (the driver) and I did the whole thing in something fairly close to silence. His first and pretty much only words to me the entire trip were, "I no speak English." Since my knowledge of Tetum and Indonesian are still somewhat limited, conversation was kept to a minimum.
The road to Los Palos follows the northern coast of the island and is in fair shape. There are a few spots where the sea, or gravity or falling rock, seem to be winning the battle, but over all it's not too bad. We made only one stop, outside of Bacau, for a quick snack of tuna on a stick. Bacau is approximately half way to Los Palos. There you will find a lively market, Philippine troops in bunkers with machine guns guarding another airport, and about 25 UN land rovers stacked on the side of the road after being having been stoned and shot up in the mayhem last September.
All along the road, however, you still see hundreds of smiling, laughing children waving and yelling "Hello Mister!". People, old and young alike, stop whatever they are doing to smile and wave as you pass though village after village. Some villages are nothing but a few shacks made of tin sheeting or bamboo or mud, and all too many of the villages have nothing left but a few slabs of cement with the burnt carcasses of huts past. These folks didn't have much to start with, but what little they had, they lost. However, I get the since that most of the folks here now are happy. I'm sure it's because they truly believe things are going to get better.