Monthly Archives: October 2008

The Happiest Place…

[Originally written for the Vanuatu Daily Post.]

There should be a trenchant, thought provoking column in this space, but I find I have nothing to gripe about. For today, at least, we live in the best of all possible worlds.

Sure, Vanuatu faces innumerable challenges. It’s still miles behind in education, health services, infrastructure, wealth… you name it. The rights of women are neglected, often criminally. The cost of living is going up, and the financial world is crumbling all around us.

But everywhere I look, I see problems worse than ours.

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Form and Function

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

[Yes, it’s a re-hash of this rant. ed.]

As a computer geek, I’m supposed to be suffused with enthusiasm and excitement over the features of the latest software. By rights, I should be the one carrying the techno-tablets down from the mountain, telling you how the latest in frobnalising ephemetry is going to change everyone’s life. I’m the one supposed to show you where to sign up and what to do with it once you’ve got it.

I have a confession to make: I hate most software.

90% of software is crap. As author Theodore Sturgeon famously said, that’s because 90% of everything is crap.

I save a particular loathing for word processors. For any but the simplest tasks, their interfaces are utterly ridiculous. I haven’t liked a word processing interface since WordPerfect circa version 5, which ran on DOS (remember DOS?). If I had my own way, I’d still be using it.

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What Heroes are Made of

Timor-Leste’s tortuous history since the mid-1970s is a sad chronicle, alternately agonising and enraging. Even its high points seem to be characterised more by pride than joy. None of them end very well, and those few that do… well, one senses that they are unfinished, unresolved.

One of the most striking individual stories is that of Major Alfredo Reinado. Respected by all and lionised by many, he died during a 2008 firefight that erupted at the residence of President Jose Ramos Horta. The President was gravely injured during the attack and spent months convalescing in Australia.

On the same morning, Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, riding in a three car convoy with his security detail, was shot at on the road to Dili. This attack was perpetrated by Alfredo’s second-in-command,  Gastão Salsinha.

Reports of the incident characterised it alternately as an assassination attempt, an abortive coup and as a meeting between the rebel leader and the President that went tragically awry.

Hundreds of people attended the Major’s funeral. Ramos Horta publicly forgave him and, far from vilifying him for his role in the turmoil that displaced as many as 150,000 people, most people remember him as a patriot and a hero.

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Tales of the North Atlantic

[Originally published in the Vanuatu Daily Post’s Weekender Edition.]

Tawi blong mi;

I write to you from the enthralling, magical island of Manhattan. This jewel of the North Atlantic is a marvelous place. It is visited by all the races of the world. They are drawn by its legendary abundance and wealth. Here, one can achieve one’s every desire. One has only to learn the curious local rituals to gather a bountiful harvest.

The Manhattoes – as they’re known – seem peculiar to us, but we should not judge them based only on a passing glimpse of their kastom and tabus. We can’t expect everyone to be like us.

The people of this lovely island have a peculiar cargo culture in which they equate meaningless numbers with material goods. I confess it’s a difficult concept to grasp. Let me explain….

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Our Greatest Wealth

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

“Being rich is having money. Being wealthy is having time.”

Vanuatu is rich in time, if little else. Everywhere you look, you’ll see people loitering, chatting, sitting together, wiling away the hours.

Doug Patterson’s Kranke Kona cartoon contrasts the Vanuatu way with the outside world’s hurry-up approach to life brilliantly: Two amiable men, sitting under the coconut tree, see an expat scurrying by, briefcase in hand, mobile phone pressed to his ear. They ask him why he’s in such a rush. He replies that if he works without respite every day, some day he’ll be able to slow down and enjoy life.

I sympathise more with the two brothers under the tree than I do with the expat. But the real humour lies in the juxtaposition. As enamoured as we all are with having the time to do things well, time is, nonetheless, a finite resource. And while it’s easy to say that time is money, we need to ensure that we don’t focus too much on its price and not enough on its value.

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A Flower in the Dust

[This feature appeared in a somewhat shorter form in the Weekender edition of the Vanuatu Daily Post.]

After decades of violence and suffering, Timor-Leste begins to bloom

Bougainvillea

There is no view quite so striking in Timor-Leste as a bougainvillea in full flower on a dusty plain. Almost every village house has one, as if to put an exclamation point on the landscape, not simply to announce but to cry out, “I’m here, I’m alive!”

After more than 35 years of violence and catastrophic suffering, at their own hands and those of a cruelly indifferent world, it’s nothing short of a marvel that the Timorese can smile at all. But on September 21st, the world’s youngest nation did just that, and more. For the first time in the country’s history, they gathered to celebrate Peace.

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The View From There

[This week’s Communications column for the Vanuatu Independent.]

I spent a couple of weeks last month in Timor-Leste, the world’s youngest nation. I’d gone to lend a hand to civil society there, to apply a few of the lessons learned in Vanuatu to the communications needs of this nascent nation.

The lessons learned were mostly mine.

Five years of immersion in the day-to-day ritual of mundane, incremental development makes it difficult to keep perspective on the big things. True, we’ve had a few red letter days in the recent past, among them the roll-out of Digicel’s new mobile network and Telecom’s massive slashing in Internet rates. But seen from so close up, the magnitude of these events is sometimes hard to grasp.

Take a few steps away, though, and things spring into focus. Timor-Leste is in a similar situation to Vanuatu when I first arrived in 2003. The government is just now developing the awareness and capacity to think comprehensively about communications. Internet use among civil society organisations is limited almost entirely to the capital, and it what little occurs is mostly between NGOs and outside agencies. There is little domestic inter-organisational communication, virtually none using anything more advanced than a telephone.

Timor is beginning to bloom now like the bougainvillea one sees amid the dust, glowing in the desert light. From one week to the next, the street I stayed on saw new shops opening, or re-opening. Timor is experiencing a quickening of the pulse.

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