A few other details

I’ve woken up this morning with conjunctivitis.  Yuck.  I am the fifth of five of us at this residence to do so.  I was just at risk of getting proud of myself for having resisted while others fell like flies around me.  The Dili chemist said it’s going around.

Yesterday the mere suggestion of it had made my eyes itch.  Or so I thought.  But of course today it turns out it’s an actual case and not an imagined one.  My eyes are nowhere nearly as bad as for three of the others, at least so far.  I’ve got straight onto antibiotics, eye drops and a lotion.  Which reminds me, the first of our number is even more “cognitively inflexible” than me, if you can believe it, and he’s refusing to take medication on the belief that it is mere coincidence that we’ve all got conjunctivitis from him when he’s only got a case of hay fever.  Hmmm.

Last night Tracey normally teaches English and runs choir practice.  She stayed home with her infectious eye, of course, but I ran her English conversation class and went to choir.  I guess that’s two more groups of people now at risk of infection.  Oops.

The sore and teary eye isn’t fun.  And it’ll probably wipe out my involvement in this Saturday’s bush walk, rice planting in the country, an Indian concert, and Sunday’s church and choir.  But it’s ok, and I’m not overly fussed, knowing it’ll run its course quickly enough.  It’d be more of a problem if I was trying to ride 1,000km a day on the bike, so there’s probably nowhere better to get it over with.

While I’m on nasties, I should probably include in my diary a few of the other elements of Timor life that require a deep breath with Melbourne-borne expectations.  I generally do my best just to exhale and acknowledge the world is full of different perspectives.  Here’s a few that I’ve found more challenging in Dili:

• All the toilets here that I’ve seen are of “western” construction.  But for some reason the flush mechanism is almost always broken.  Rather than fixing these, most often there’s just a big bucket of water and a scoop.  To flush, one just tips as many scoops of water from the bucket as necessary to clean the bowl.  One side effect of this process is that you’ll nearly always encounter a wet toilet seat.  Lovely!  Seriously… how hard can it be to find a plumber and fix a few of these in batch?
• Water is of course not good for “malae” (westerners) to drink from most sources.  I’ve been more relaxed about this than many are, but I have… let’s say… subsequently “counted the cost”.  So I’ve reverted to only bottled or filtered water, even for brushing my teeth.  The local drinking water hasn’t troubled me on previous trips to India, Thailand and Indonesia, but either my guts aren’t what they once were, or Timor’s water is a notch more “interesting” than the rest of South East Asia.  Either way, bottled water for me for now.
• Dish washing is done in cold water, occasionally using washing up liquid.  I just have to actively block that out of mind when eating.  And house cats generally get the run of the place, including on all eating and cooking surfaces, and they’re encouraged to do a first pass at “washing dishes” by licking off the scraps.  I didn’t tell Mokul at the previous back-packer that this causes me grief, but Tracey just laughs at my prejudice.
• I’m not quite sure why, but we need to turn a pump on to use tap water at Tracey’s.  I still forget and find myself in a dry shower more times than I care to admit.  Could a plumber help?  It’s a pretty small nuisance, all things considered.
• Mosquitos are just accepted as part of life, and there’s almost always a few floating around your ankles if you sit for any amount of time.  Here at my current home I’m quite sure that’d be drastically improved simply by cleaning up the garden a bit, and by better treatment of the sewerage system out the back.  Time to call that plumber?  I’m told that dengue fever is only a problem from day-time mosquitos, but I’m still trying to work out how that actually helps.  Apparently malaria is your only problem from night biters.  That’s encouraging, right?!
• I’ve already chronicled the open sewers, closed sewers with missing caps, and the consequential pervasive sewer smells across town.
• Every meal is some variant of rice and chicken, or if you really splurge you’ll include a bit of fish.  I got fed up with it the other day and came back with some frozen NZ beef (no fresh choices available), and even as tough and tasteless as it was it was a welcome – but expensive – change.
• Milk is simply not available anywhere as a fresh option, but only as long-life.  Again Tracey simply laughs at me, saying taste is a matter of what you get used to.  Probably.  But I have no intention of getting used to the sickly-sweet taste of long-life milk.  Consequently I’ve reverted reluctantly to black tea and haven’t had a coffee in weeks.  I don’t expect any of that to change for a while.
• There’s a restaurant not too far away which often has guests singing loudly and badly until 2 or 3am.  And the dogs bark incessantly until later even than that, eventually stopping just in time for the local mosque to call for prayer at something like 5am.  The local gecko has a booming call not unlike out-of-control hiccups, and goes on and on right through the night.  On the upside, all this means I’m awake to hear when the mozzies stop buzzing – a sure sign they’ve found bare skin and deserve a whack with the tennis-racquet styled “zapper”.  More often than not I’ll need a grandpa nap in the afternoon to recharge. That is if the pigs – yes, that’s right; pigs – next door aren’t screaming like they’re dying, and the local street vendors aren’t beep-beeping to alert customers of their presence five suburbs away.
• Internet is most often painfully slow.  I’m trying to keep photos and videos organised for me, posted in my diary, and saved in the cloud.  It typically takes days of wrestling each time I attempt to get on top of it.  And I really can’t get my head around WordPress’s treatment of photos either, which causes ongoing grief and lost hours for each diary entry that has images.  I’d like to stay almost entirely out of tech on this trip, but unfortunately that isn’t proving possible.

I’m not complaining.  I just thought I should batch up a few of these observations.  Otherwise I know I’ll forget them as the trip unfolds.  You can’t take on an “adventure” and want for all the creature comforts from home.  In fact, it is a constant, simple reminder of how much there is to be thankful for.  It is so easy to take so much for granted.  But it doesn’t reduce my yen for the bike to arrive and (hopefully) bring a modicum of freedom with it.  Although that freedom will for a long while only replace one set of challenges with another, at least I’ll feel a little more in control.