Nugie has had a great week; she has been a bridesmaid, she had a birthday party and she became the youngest East Timorese diver ever.
Nugie, Jose, Marianne and Jurgen, Dili Rock, 18th October 2007
On the 22nd of Au
gust 2007, Nugie (Gracilda Amaral Soares) became the youngest ever East Timorese to breathe on scuba in the Hotel Esplanada pool. At that stage she was nine years old and did a PADI Bubblemaker. This entails throwing around an underwater torpedo, swimming through hoops, doing handstands and basically having fun. The 17th of October was her 10th birthday and after sitting through a PADI DVD, with help from one of our wonderful diving staff on the hard translation bits, she completed her first confined water session with me. Today, the day after her 10th birthday, she became the youngest ever Timorese to breathe on scuba in the Open Water, she is also the youngest in East Timor to complete the PADI Discover Scuba Diving Course. What a birthday present!
Anjleen Hannak of course is still the youngest PADI Open Water Diver in East Timor, qualifying at the age of 10; she is now 11 and a veteran diver with 26 open water dives. But who knows how long she will hold this title.
Living in East Timor, it’s hard to keep in touch with people; I guess that’s why I started this blog. Whilst the media were sensationalising events here, I wanted to reassure loved ones that I wasn’t living in the dangerous minefield of violence that some TV networks made it out to be. Email etc. may seem a little impersonal at times but other communication methods can be challenging; my UK SIM card does not work in East Timor and my East Timor SIM card allows me to text Indonesia, randomly Australia but not the UK! There is one place at Tiger Fuels that has 24hour broadband with Skype facilities, but the time difference with the UK is another challenge as East Timor is 9hrs ahead.
The phone company here is called Timor Telecom and they have the monopoly on the telecommunications network. You can get a land line, but telephone lines get stolen for the copper, so like a friend of mine, you can find yourself without a land line for over six months. Most people use mobile phones to communicate which you recharge using scratch cards bought from small boys at the side of the road. Call costs are horrendous, so most of us use text. Personally, I have never been a fan of text as they seem impersonal and can be misinterpreted, but the cost of voice calls makes them necessary.
However, the Philippinos love to text and seem to have their own text language. The first text I ever received started with ‘Gd am’. It took me about 10 minutes to realise that ‘Gd am’ was ‘Good Morning!’
Back to Timor Telecom; they made themselves extremely unpopular last year at the beginning of the crisis when telephone network crashed making telecommunication total impossible. Trying to raise their image they introduced voice mail a couple of months ago, this was a fiasco because your phone automatically diverted into voice mail but you couldn’t retrieve them. In the first week we got 44 voice mail messages that we couldn’t listen to. Now we have managed to shut the service off.
On the 17th, it was Timor Telecoms 5th anniversary, so at 7am everyone in the country received a text message to recharge their phone before midnight and receive double the credit value. This threw the whole country’s telephone network into chaos again. No-one could make calls, send texts or recharge their phone, the network was always busy, it just couldn’t cope. I started to recharge my phone at 6.30 pm and still hadn’t succeeded at 7am the next morning. Bruce was smug though as he had been to the Timor Telecom office and paid $50 over the counter. They automatically credited him $100 using their computer. ‘That was a good idea’ Ann exclaimed, ‘why didn’t you ring us and tell us?’ Bruce’s reply, ‘Because the phones were down!’
New restaurants, bars and massage parlours are still springing up around town. There’s even the odd tattoo parlour; however, the one on the Comoro road advertising ‘Tatto’ doesn’t inspire much confidence.
By the way, for anyone reading this in the UK; the programme featuring Ross Kemp in East Timor is being shown on Monday the 22nd. I think it is channel 4, but I’m not sure.
On the 22nd of Au
gust 2007, Nugie (Gracilda Amaral Soares) became the youngest ever East Timorese to breathe on scuba in the Hotel Esplanada pool. At that stage she was nine years old and did a PADI Bubblemaker. This entails throwing around an underwater torpedo, swimming through hoops, doing handstands and basically having fun. The 17th of October was her 10th birthday and after sitting through a PADI DVD, with help from one of our wonderful diving staff on the hard translation bits, she completed her first confined water session with me. Today, the day after her 10th birthday, she became the youngest ever Timorese to breathe on scuba in the Open Water, she is also the youngest in East Timor to complete the PADI Discover Scuba Diving Course. What a birthday present!Anjleen Hannak of course is still the youngest PADI Open Water Diver in East Timor, qualifying at the age of 10; she is now 11 and a veteran diver with 26 open water dives. But who knows how long she will hold this title.
Living in East Timor, it’s hard to keep in touch with people; I guess that’s why I started this blog. Whilst the media were sensationalising events here, I wanted to reassure loved ones that I wasn’t living in the dangerous minefield of violence that some TV networks made it out to be. Email etc. may seem a little impersonal at times but other communication methods can be challenging; my UK SIM card does not work in East Timor and my East Timor SIM card allows me to text Indonesia, randomly Australia but not the UK! There is one place at Tiger Fuels that has 24hour broadband with Skype facilities, but the time difference with the UK is another challenge as East Timor is 9hrs ahead.
The phone company here is called Timor Telecom and they have the monopoly on the telecommunications network. You can get a land line, but telephone lines get stolen for the copper, so like a friend of mine, you can find yourself without a land line for over six months. Most people use mobile phones to communicate which you recharge using scratch cards bought from small boys at the side of the road. Call costs are horrendous, so most of us use text. Personally, I have never been a fan of text as they seem impersonal and can be misinterpreted, but the cost of voice calls makes them necessary.
However, the Philippinos love to text and seem to have their own text language. The first text I ever received started with ‘Gd am’. It took me about 10 minutes to realise that ‘Gd am’ was ‘Good Morning!’
Back to Timor Telecom; they made themselves extremely unpopular last year at the beginning of the crisis when telephone network crashed making telecommunication total impossible. Trying to raise their image they introduced voice mail a couple of months ago, this was a fiasco because your phone automatically diverted into voice mail but you couldn’t retrieve them. In the first week we got 44 voice mail messages that we couldn’t listen to. Now we have managed to shut the service off.
On the 17th, it was Timor Telecoms 5th anniversary, so at 7am everyone in the country received a text message to recharge their phone before midnight and receive double the credit value. This threw the whole country’s telephone network into chaos again. No-one could make calls, send texts or recharge their phone, the network was always busy, it just couldn’t cope. I started to recharge my phone at 6.30 pm and still hadn’t succeeded at 7am the next morning. Bruce was smug though as he had been to the Timor Telecom office and paid $50 over the counter. They automatically credited him $100 using their computer. ‘That was a good idea’ Ann exclaimed, ‘why didn’t you ring us and tell us?’ Bruce’s reply, ‘Because the phones were down!’
New restaurants, bars and massage parlours are still springing up around town. There’s even the odd tattoo parlour; however, the one on the Comoro road advertising ‘Tatto’ doesn’t inspire much confidence.
By the way, for anyone reading this in the UK; the programme featuring Ross Kemp in East Timor is being shown on Monday the 22nd. I think it is channel 4, but I’m not sure.
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