Jackie Coleman spent January working at the Maubere Cultural Institute (MCI) in Dili, East Timor. Her visit, on behalf of Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor (ASIET), was in response to a request for assistance from the institute. In this article, Coleman describes her stay.
Visiting an agricultural cooperative in the steep hills behind Dili, I realised that a lot of the children, teenagers and adults were already familiar to me from the English classes at the MCI where I had been working for some time. The cooperative president, Santiago Tilman, told me how enthusiastic everyone was about the classes.
When I asked Tilman how the children, some as young as six, got to class, he told me that they had no alternative but to make the 16 kilometre round-trip on foot. Their parents considered learning English so important that the children were excused from helping in the fields.
The MCI was established last October, just one month after the Indonesian army's rampage though East Timor. It is run by young, unpaid, highly motivated Timorese volunteer English teachers.
Many were part way through degrees at Indonesian universities when they returned to East Timor.
The teachers are enthusiastically committed to the MCI's aim of fostering traditional Timorese culture and language as the nation moves toward independence. Timorese culture has survived the imposition of two colonising powers, with their cultures and languages; for hundreds of years, Portugal and, since 1975, Indonesia.
The most widely spoken indigenous language, Tetum, will become one of the new national languages and it appears that one of the colonial languages will become the other official language of independent East Timor.
The MCI aims to eventually foster the development of Tetum as a standardised, written national language. The MCI already provides Tetum classes in villages in the Liquica area, where only local dialects are spoken.
The language of the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) is English and it is crucial that the Timorese have a knowledge of that language during its administration. This is the main reason why the MCI has prioritised the teaching of English.
Another reason is that fluency in English is a criterion for gaining what little employment there is, usually with foreign organisations. (I witnessed a spontaneous public expression of frustration and resentment in Dili, when thousands of people lining up to apply for UNTAET jobs discovered that English was an essential criterion.)
The MCI also believes that skill in English will be an important tool in the development of Tetum.
Many of the MCI students, such as 20-year-old Natalino who hopes to study journalism in Australia, also express the desire to be able to speak what they term "an international language" after so many years of imposed cultural isolation from their neighbours in Asia.
Conditions at the MCI are very difficult. Classes take place in an abandoned Indonesian building in the suburb of Balide. One room has no chairs so as many as 60 students receive lessons sitting on the tiled floor.
There is one grammar textbook shared between five teachers and there are no copying facilities. When I was there, two young teachers, Cris and Akara, were trying to repair a photocopier damaged by an Indonesian firebomb.
Nonetheless, there is a tangible sense of hope because the teachers and the hundreds of students know that together they are developing valuable skills which will allow them to actively participate in building a democratic, independent East Timor.