“Healing Timor Leste – a Consultation of Specialists” - book review

 

Consultation material collated and edited by Margaret J.E. King Boyes, AM, PhD, with Associate Editors Eveline B. Goy and Lea Frick ( Blackwood Press 2006, ISBN 0-646-46261-X )

 

(Based on Canberra booklaunch speaking notes by Tony Kevin, at the ACT Legislative Assembly Building , , 27 Nov 2006)

 

 

I am honoured to have been invited to launch this most unusual and worthwhile book. It offers a delightful smorgasbord of reflections and recollections by highly talented and idealistic individuals who have devoted significant parts of their lives and talents over many years to helping people in East Timor , as healers and carers of the sick and afflicted, for no personal material gain.

 

All have gained great spiritual and philosophical wisdom from their voluntary work in Timor Leste over many years, both during the Indonesian occupation and since. Their staying power in Timor Leste is impressive and gives their views great authority and authenticity.

 

Though the professional focus is primarily medical, there is a great diversity of backgrounds in these contributors to a written consultation – two world-class surgeons, a general practice doctor, a nurse, an administrative coordinator, a young volunteer, a personal secretary based in Adelaide , a leading anthropologist, a photography specialist, an immigration and welfare public servant, a languages specialist. All offer different insights. We learn much from them, about our own society as well as about Timor Leste.

 

A lot of this book resonates convincingly with my own learning experience as Australian ambassador to Cambodia in 1994-97. This was my first professional posting, at age 51, to a war-devastated Third World country, but one like Timor Leste with unquenchable pride in its own language and culture. It was also my first encounter with the international development assistance culture, extending from the large well-funded organisations of people with shiny new 4WDs and mobile phones staying in comfortable hotels or moored cruise ships, down to the heroic small outfits of Australian and other volunteer healers and helpers who lived at the level of ordinary people in villages. It was a great privilege to get to know these kinds of Australians, very similar in philosophy I surmise to those who are the co-authors of this book.

 

We see criticisms here – politely expressed but firm - of thoughtless Western developmentalism based on “the Washington consensus” – a view of development that prioritises a cash export-driven market model, coupled with an arrogant and blind insensitivity to local values and cultures. I saw some of that in Cambodia too.

 

Also, at the political level, the frequent unreliability of media reporting in these countries, the stereotyping of complex situations into “good guys and bad guys”, the lazy reliance on official background briefings that often have their own undeclared agendas.

 

For example, who is to know the truth of what is happening now in the Solomons?

 

In Timor Leste, who is to know the truth of the current roles and interrelationships of key political players like the Armed Forces chief, Brigadier General Taur Matan Ruak? Fretilin's Secretary General and former Prime Minister Dr. Mari Alkatiri ? The present Prime Minister Ramos Horta? President Xanana Gusmao ? The Catholic Church leadership?

 

The Timor Leste leadership elite may well sort out the present tensions – as seen in this week's upsurge of unrest in Dili - in their own way, if only we leave them to exercise their sovereignty in order to find their own solutions. I sense there is too much heavy-handed interference from Australia now.

 

Generally, I have a well-based skepticism of officially-briefed Western commentaries on such situations in developing countries under stress. I saw how badly the truth was being distorted in Cambodia by some embassies and powerful Western lobby groups with their own political agendas. I also saw what can happen to the reporting of local leaders who challenge powerful Western stereotypes of what should be and what should not be.

 

It takes a very special kind of national leader to have the moral strength to resist preferred “ Washington consensus” solutions. And I note that national leaders can start strong and become worn down – or corrupted - by the relentless pressure of a powerful donor consensus culture. Or, if they resist, they can be demonized and destabilised.

 

I think of politicians like Hun Sen in Cambodia, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Malaysia's Mahathir, and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez as examples of national leaders who did not give in to powerful outside pressures. The present Prime Minister of Spain Jose Luis Zapatero has similar qualities, quietly expressed but determined. He has resisted an Anglophone consensus of how Spain should conduct itself in the world.

 

Will a leader like this emerge in Timor Leste? Will one of the present generation of Timor 's leaders grow into such a statesman role?

 

I tend to measure the worth of a Timor Leste leader at this time by the extent to which he can stand up to Australian government bribery or bullying.

 

This book taught me a lot I had not known before about Portugal 's great importance culturally in Timor Leste, the strong affinities of history and culture and blood between these two countries over 400 years. Our Australian stereotype that Portugal was a lazy and uncaring colonial administrator in Timor Leste just isn't so, according to the picture presented in this book. It seems clear that Portugal played a large and generally benign influence in Timor Leste. We do Portugal a great injustice here if we take an arrogant Anglophone view of Timor Leste's colonial-era history. Margaret King Boyes' two previous books and her two essays here are an important corrective.

 

It seems clear that the real damage to Timor Leste was done during the 25 years of Indonesian misrule, colonization and efforts to suppress the national aspirations of the people. The present young confused and alienated urban generation is the product of those years of cultural and linguistic breakdown.

 

The book reminds us of the wonderful qualities of many Australian healers and carers, who have for many years served as motivated individuals in Timor Leste. They have had the humility and wisdom and staying power to be learners as well as teachers, to think about what lessons Timor Leste has for our rich but not especially happy societies. I think of Dr Colette Livermore's wise commentary on pages 103-104 on the quality of village life in Timor Leste – admittedly it may not be like this in west Dili now - from which I want to read a little:

 

“It is a paradox in the West that we have so many time saving devices but so little time. There is no time just to enjoy a beautiful and quiet place, to even notice the night sky or the rising moon. There is so much noise, so much rushing. The TV is seldom silent. It insidiously brainwashes both us and our children.

 

In poorer societies life is simpler. While it can be a risk to romanticise destitution, they do have some things that wealthy countries do not. A family unit needs to pull together. It is not just the parents providing for the children, the children also need to give according to their capacity.

 

Children are taught from an early age to look beyond themselves and care for the other. Little girls nurse their smaller siblings, children carry water and wood for the family, they work with parents in the gardens, help with the household tasks, care for domestic animals and forage for food for them.

 

People are not as isolated. Children play together and roam the neighbourhood. People move freely between each others' huts and houses. Fences enclose animals and gardens but not people. People are less packaged by houses and cars; they stay close to the beauty of the mountains and the night sky.”

 

Beautiful writing, and I found similar things in Cambodian villages too.

 

Colette Livermore continues:

 

“In Australia , learning to look beyond the confines of ourselves and our own community may well strengthen the compassion within our own society which can become cynical and jaded. To work together with the Timorese to improve education ands freedom from debilitating illness while preserving the uniqueness, resilience, family and community spirit of the Timorese could help us in Australia to learn from the simplicity of life, joy, courage and determination of the Timorese peoples.”

 

That generous spirit - some may call it sentimentalism, but I call it human empathy – imbues this book .

 

The book emphasizes the profound importance to Timor Leste society of helping the most damaged individuals in villages – leprosy and polio victims, burn deformity victims, birth defect victims. We see in the book inspiring photographs of miracles of facial reconstructive surgery for these suffering children, miracle cures in which I see something almost Biblical ( for I am a Christian). Jesus went into poor villages and He healed the sick, the lame, the blind, and the lepers. He did not say that these resources must be spent on building roads to markets or on building fish processing plants for export. He healed, as surgeons like Dr John Hargrave and Dr Mark Moore have healed in Timor Leste. These are the right priorities, I would suggest: putting people first.

 

Margaret King Boyes' substantial philosophical essays at the beginning and end – the “bookends” of this fine work drawing together the insights o many individuals - are worth persevering with. She has a great individuality of expression, a personal voice that has the vision to leap from the global to the local, to state important truths about our world in sometimes startlingly unfamiliar language. Her writing is well worth the effort of comprehension, for there is great compassion and wisdom here.

 

Finally, this book speaks to me of the power of sensitive, brave and caring individuals to use their professional and administrative and language skills to make a difference to people who need help now - and the capacity of large uncaring and ill-informed bureaucratic collectives to waste resources and even to do harm by sapping morale, corrupting indigenous ethical values, and creating resentments. I saw all that in Cambodia too. I have no reason to believe it is not true in Timor Leste. We can all learn much from this fine book, if we read it with open eyes and open minds

 

 

- Tony Kevin, Canberra 31 October 2006