Matt Crook, Dili – It was a humid night and I wandered home in the dark, cursing the government of Timor-Leste for yet another power cut in Dili, the country's tiny capital.
I was lumbering up the road to my house, illuminating my path with my mobile to avoid the crater-like potholes, when I heard someone call out. "Eh, malae!" said the voice, "malae" being the Timorese word for foreigner. I looked to my right and saw a group of youths sat atop the burned-out shell of what had at one time been a car. I thought for a minute and then decided to throw caution to the wind. Before long I was sat on top of the car knocking back home-brewed palm brandy and snacking on uncooked instant noodles.
I got to know that group of lads quite well over the next few months. Any night when I was at a loose end I'd venture down the road and sure enough they'd all be there, sat on top of their rusting hunk of metal. We usually drank until well into the night and I used to help them scrape together a buck or two to pay for the liquor, but I soon became aware that these guys didn't really have anything else to do besides hanging out on the side of the road, a familiar sight down almost any of Dili's streets.
None of them ever had phone credit and there was a lethargy about them that was hard to miss. They would sometimes ask me if I knew of any jobs going, but in a small Southeast Asian nation, ravaged by 24 years of illegal occupation by the Indonesian military, development has progressed slowly and these future breadwinners in what is a male-dominated society are still bread-less.
The only jobs these young chaps could envisage themselves doing were things like driving taxis, working as security guards or – and this one was the Holy Grail – leaving East Timor and travelling to the UK to work in a factory on a Portuguese passport, taking advantage of Timor-Leste's colonial past.
It's easy to pass off Timor-Leste's youth unemployment problem as something that just takes a while to overcome, but post-conflict countries don't have the luxury of time. When the UN arrived in 1999 to help secure independence, it operated a top-down approach that all but ignored the needs of the people at the grassroots level, the guys who would end up sat on top of burned-out cars, and it was their dissatisfaction with independence that played a significant role in the violence of 2006.
The riots of 2006 weren't supposed to happen and they certainly weren't supposed to leave 37 people dead and 150,000 displaced. The international community had helped the nation formally achieve its independence in 2002, but then as the UN scaled back it left behind a weak democracy and a divided society.
Timor-Leste is a young nation in every respect, with about half of the population of 1.1 million aged below the age of 17, according to the World Bank. Women have, on average, six children each and the youth demographic (12-29) makes up more than one-third of the population.
In 2006, when a labour dispute in the armed forces escalated into a crisis that brought the country to its knees, the international community had little choice but to admit the shortcomings of international aid as disenfranchised youths went out onto the streets and fought with neither rhyme nor reason.
Timor-Leste's youths have struggled to conceptualize their national identity outside of their country's independence struggle. The unification of the people within what became "Timor-Leste" simply didn't happen in the beginning and and what divides there were became institutionalized and politicized as the elites squabbled among themselves for the spoils of the state.
Youth unemployment peaks at more than 40 percent in Timor-Leste's urban centers and yet successive governments have been unable to tackle this because they've had security issues top of their agenda. The Secretariat of State for Vocational Training and Employment (SEFOPE) hasn't had the capacity to put the pieces together, but things are changing.
Timor-Leste is still a predominantly agricultural country and the government and its partners have been working hard to create gainful employment opportunities for young people, especially in rural areas as the cities can't cope with the influx of jobless youths.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) took the bull by the horns early on with what it called an "unusual approach" to employment generation.
ILO started delivering activities through SEFOPE, rather than utilizing the standard method of creating a team of skilled national personnel on unsustainable UN salaries, which often leads to project collapse once the program closes.
ILO's support of SEFOPE has brought the government closer to skills training providers and micro-finance institutions, bolstering the capacity of each and opening up new opportunities for short- and long-term employment. I saw various employment-generating projects as I travelled around the country meeting young blacksmiths, artists, laborers and groups producing everything from coconut oil to tofu.
With a state budget of more than a billion dollars for 2011 – by far the largest in the country's history – there are high hopes among the Timorese people that their government will be able to come good on promises to replace conflict with development... permanently.
As for my little gang on the car, the last I heard one had left Timor-Leste for the UK and the rest were muddling through on cockfight winnings and handouts from their families. The car wreck, however, had been removed, towed away in the dead of the night.