John McCarthy

Saturday 15/7/2000

8.00 am. Well, I am going home today. It seems that there will be no students, today.
My last few hours in Timor Loro Sae (East Timor) are going to be easy.

8:15 am: Three young men arrive to learn computing. They have regularly attended the classes for the last four days. They can practise what they have learnt and I will be around to give them any help required. Easy!

8:30 am: There are now 53 people all wanting to learn computing. We have only six working computers (three laptops which the group had carried on the plane and three 486s donated by the Portugese Mission to East Timor). Amongst the 53, there were very few who knew any English and my Tetum was limited to about 20 words.

There would be no easy last few hours for me in East Timor! How wrong I could be.

These people are so keen to learn new skills that to teach them was not only a joy but refreshing and invigorating as well. Once I had issued them all with a disk, showed them how to Create a document using MSWorks, key their name, save the file and Close and then move over for the next person, I had nothing more to do.

For the next four hours we played musical chairs as each one loaded their file added to it or edited it and saved and then made space for the next person. It was in this circumstance that I confirmed my decision to come back for my October holidays.

I am sure the ten Notre Dame students would also have had the same rewarding experience teaching English in Vequeque, Letefoho and Ainaro. All the local students are so keen to learn. After 25 years of deprivation of the liberty to learn what they liked (education was conducted in Indonesian) they are enjoying or would like to enjoy freedom to learn.

Unfortunately in those two areas where they are so keen (English and Technology) there are so few teachers. The students are also helping to restore trust in foreigners. After the Indonesians, the Australian troops restored much confidence in outside help (for 25 years the East Timorese pleas for help had fallen on deaf ears).

When authority was handed from INTERFET to the UN, the occupation army of East Timor meant the supplanting of the Indonesian army of occupation by the UN army of occupation.

Armed Hummer trucks drive ceaselessly around the city. The buildings that were not destroyed are now occupied by the UN and are surrounded by rolls of razor wire and are guarded by armed troops. These compounds hold a huge number of UN equipment, trucks, bulldozers, diggers, graders etc.

Outside these compounds, the roads are potholed, there are heaps of rubbish, drains are blocked and most of the people are forced to live in squalor and poverty.

When will East Timor be free?  

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The East Timorese people have expressed a great eagerness to learn computer skills, second only to their desire to learn English.

There are few computers available for people to learn skills.

We are collecting computers from Western Australian schools and businesses and redeploying them in East Timor but we don't have the manpower to refurbish or check equipment before it goes.

We ask donors to go one step further and sponsor a Computer Cluster.

Several schools and organisations have already agreed to do this and their computers are hard at work in East Timor.

This is how it works.

You set up your own project team to put together a self contained cluster of hardware, software, printer and cabling packaged up so that it can go to an appropriate location such as a school, community centre or health clinic.

There may be ways in which you could do it as school project and allow kids to get academic credit for it.

We will tell you where its gone and try to establish communication for you and help to maintain a relationship.

A cluster could be anything from 1 computer to 50 provided they are all the same, networked and have a printer. It would be helpful if you could include some consumables as well.

Describe your cluster to us and we will identify a suitable task for it such as

• general computer training
• producing medical brochures
• publishing a newspaper
• teaching English
• basic word processing
• maths teaching
• music writing

It doesn't matter what your cluster is provided it does one job well and is self contained.

We will then arrange for the cluster to be shipped to Dili, we will train people to use it and then relocate it to where it is most needed.

If you have a cluster but lack networking gear or networking gear but no computers, contact us because we may be able to fix that up with volunteer labour.

We would also like:

Internet access in Dili (anybody?)