Keith B. Richburg, Dili – At one of the two new floating hotels in Dili last week, it was standing room only at the upper-deck bar.
Relief workers, United Nations officials, foreign peacekeeping troops and journalists stood shoulder to shoulder, swapping stories and exchanging mobile phone numbers as cold beer flowed, music blared and the cook behind the counter had trouble keeping up with the cheeseburger orders.
Outside, the capital's main waterfront road was jammed with new vehicles, most of them with license plates from the Darwin area in Australia. They cruised past block after block of burned-out shells of buildings, although the street is dotted with colorful new restaurants, hotels and bars.
But at the local offices of the Roman Catholic charity Caritas, Rogerio dos Santos, the deputy director, still cannot make an overseas telephone call to his headquarters to ask for more rice.
Before East Timor voted August 30 to become independent from Indonesia – sending Indonesian soldiers and their militia protigis on a rampage of killing and destruction – Caritas was one of the main relief groups distributing rice around the territory.
The group bought rice from Indonesian government warehouses or got it from a companion aid agency in Jakarta. Now, its sources have been cut off, and dozens of foreign relief groups have arrived in town. And the local Caritas office, like every other building here, was looted bare, with all its phones and fax machines stolen.
Mr. dos Santos does not mind the massive influx of aid agencies into East Timor – just as he does not mind seeing the increasing number of cars, hotels and restaurants springing up here to cater to the expanding foreign community. But, he said, "Something is wrong."
"It's not a priority for me – hotels, big cars," he added. "The priority for me is that people need food and reconstruction materials for their houses."
It is a growing concern. With East Timor now essentially stable, under the protection of an Australian-led peacekeeping force and administered by the United Nations, the territory has moved from being an emergency case to being a kind of laboratory for development and reconstruction.
Everything here needs rebuilding – and that has brought in hundreds of foreign relief workers from, at last count, 40 agencies, primed with theories of development and years of experience from disaster zones such as Cambodia, Somalia and Rwanda.
And behind the relief workers have come the entrepreneurs, mostly from Australia's northern coast, the "Northern Territory carpetbaggers," as they are sometimes jokingly called.
They supply the vehicles, set up the housing and ship in the beer, the refrigerators, the mobile telephones, the fax machines and just about everything else that the expanding expatriate community needs to survive in relative comfort in a devastated city without stores or basic supplies.
"There's a vacuum here that people are moving to fill," said one Darwin-based businessman, explaining his decision to come to Dili. "Businessmen go everywhere in the world, and this is virgin territory."
While Australians may be the largest and most visible contingent, they are not the only one. Portugal, East Timor's colonial ruler before Indonesia invaded and annexed the territory in 1975, has returned in force, announcing plans for East Timor's first bank and giving back pay to its former civil servants – in Portuguese escudos.
All this has created a bewildering mishmash of currencies – Australian dollars, escudos, US dollars and the Indonesian rupiah, now used mostly by small traders and taxi drivers. On the floating hotels, which sailed here from Singapore, the crew is Singapore-based and is paid in Singapore dollars. The concern now is that with all the resources being poured into expatriate logistics, the more basic needs of the East Timorese may be ignored – or at least may become far more glaring by contrast.
Veteran relief workers speak with horror about what they call "the Cambodia problem" – the multibillion-dollar effort to rebuild Cambodia, a country where, eight years after the arrival of the UN transitional authority, the relief community is still the only major source of legitimate income. Average Cambodians remain as poor as they were nearly a decade ago.
Some say the "Cambodia problem" is already occurring in East Timor. "It's real bad," said a longtime official of a UN agency with experience in other disaster areas.
"I'd like to see some kind of spreading of the income over the population," the official said. "It's difficult. We need to put money into the real economy, and not just the aid economy. And we need to support the setting up of businesses – and not only Australian businesses."
Among other things, he said, he hoped the ethnic Chinese businesses who fled during the violence in the territory could be persuaded to return.
Jose Ramos-Horta, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and senior official of the National Council for Timorese Resistance, said he, too, was aware of the potential problem and was determined to prevent it.
"Frankly, I would never allow this to happen, because it would mean betraying the people," Mr. Ramos-Horta said. "For the time being, we understand," he said.