Jill Jolliffe, Gugleur – Gugleur has little to recommend it. Its people are subsistence farmers and the maize crop has failed this year. The dust whips around the cluster of forlorn thatched huts that provide the bare necessity of shelter, no trimmings.
But it is the birthplace of Luzina Afonso, 27, who, with the help of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), has finally returned to its safety after a nightmare three years in a refugee camp in Lak Pehan, Indonesian West Timor.
Her manner of speaking suggests she is suffering from clinical depression. Her head is down; her mouth is a slit that barely moves to get the words out; her face is expressionless.
The tears welling in her soft brown eyes give the only clue that she and her husband, Bento de Jesus, have returned with three dead babies.
The tiny bodies of son Oviano Bi Kau, 2, and daughters Maria, seven months, and Anise, three months, accompanied them on their journey home with the UNHCR and are now buried in the humblest of graves in a jungle clearing opposite. Their two other children, born in the camp, have survived.
Ms Afonso had been trying to come home since late 2000, when her father, Americo, escaped and returned to Gugleur. "The first of my children died in November and I couldn't leave without his body," she says.
At that time Indonesian authorities did not permit refugees to bring their dead back; that came only in January last year, after long pressure by the UNHCR. Since then 721 bodies have been repatriated with 27,160 live refugees.
For the UNHCR's Jake Morland it was an important victory. Culturally it was important for the East Timorese. They could not leave their loved ones' remains in a foreign country.
The people of Gugleur did not travel to West Timor by choice: they were among a quarter of a million East Timorese deported in an operation co-ordinated by the Indonesian military during the militia terror of 1999.
The struggle to reach home has been hard, and after tomorrow it will be even harder. From September 1 the Indonesian Government will cut off the subsidy it pays refugees to return.
About 200 metres from Ms Afonso's house is another family group of 24 people. They brought back nine cadavers.
Three of Alberto Freitas's children died in the Kota Baru camp in Atambua: Alberto, 6, Tomas, 3, and Carlos, six months, died there in 2000. According to Alberto, the deaths in the camp occurred because people were weakened by malnutrition.
"People had pains in the gut, headaches, diarrhoea, and there were no medicines," he says. He claims official rations from Indonesian authorities were five kilograms of rice and $US1.50 a year for each person. (Ms Afonso says people in her camp received a kilo of rice a month.)
"We cut sago to add to our diet." The villagers' story is a grim epitaph to warnings issued since 1999 that conditions in Indonesian camps put babies and the elderly at risk. They reported malnutrition as the underlying factor in the deaths, but the main immediate causes as malaria, diarrhoea and respiratory illness.
The pattern continues at Kai Kasa, 17 kilometres away, with the difference that people here were in Berluli camp near coastal Atapupu, under the iron rule of the Besih Merah Putih militia group. More than 20 cadavers came back recently, says Moises de Carvalho, the head of a family. He links many deaths to Indonesia's cutting of welfare to refugees last January. "We had no food for seven months. Many people have died." Last month a Japanese Foreign Ministry official, Yasuhiro Sugata, visited West Timor to ask its Government why it had not disbursed a grant of $US6 million to help the refugees after the welfare cut. He received no satisfactory replies.
At 159 under-five deaths per 1000 live births, East Timor's infant mortality rate is extremely high, as it would be in poverty-stricken Gugleur.