Separation from the UK political discourse

(Unrelated to Timor, but something I’ve been thinking about this week. My main points are that (i) I can personally see why the left is arguing against the cuts and agree, but (ii) I think they are failing to successfully communicate their reasoning beyond the headline of "cuts are bad"; people get this, but aren't aware what the alternatives are. )

Being on the other side of the world and largely deprived of UK media and political conversations with friends over the last 2 months has been a real eye-opener. It made me realise what a muffled message most people in the UK are likely to get on politics, and how important it is to get the message clear and reasoned. Here on the other side of the world, I’m hearing the basic message, but not the reasoning.

At home, I read the Guardian and BBC, topped up with Liberal Conspiracy, Left Foot Forward and Guido, then discuss issues in the pub with friends regularly. Here, I’m reading far more on East Timor and international affairs. Consequently, I’m only receiving about 10% of the UK-oriented information that I usually get.

For example, I could tell you that in recent weeks students have been demonstrating against increases in top-up fees and Labour are organising against most cuts in general. But I couldn’t tell you the nuanced arguments behind why Labour are arguing against most of the cuts, beyond “they’ll hit the poor hardest” which is obvious.

I am instinctively drawn to anti-cuts positions, being an independent man of the left. (I have variously voted Lib Dem and Green but not yet Labour – I was sixteen on 9/11, after which they became authoritarian and war-mongering – that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t vote Labour if Ed Miliband cleans things up). However, without the detail, the likely right-wing counter-argument is harder to refute. For example, Labour’s election campaign also acknowledged the need for cuts, just slower ones on a slightly different ratio. Is it not hypocritical of them to wail at every lost public sector job?

I know that most of Labour’s positions are defensible. I would and could happily defend them myself. My point is that with my media intake being 10% of what it usually is, I couldn’t immediately tell you how they are defending it currently. This is important, because even out here I’m probably still reading 10x more news than the majority of the British public.

It really brings it home how important the headlines are, and how you need to make the message simple yet reasoned. Anyone arguing against cuts needs to be upfront about either (i) what they would cut instead, (ii) which taxes they would raise instead, or (iii) why cuts aren’t needed at all. I want to hear this every time an anti-cuts statement is made.

Whilst it’s fair to say that the Tories are being overly ideological in some respects and going further than is needed, that is a side-issue – everyone campaigned on the fact that some cuts are needed. The default right-wing response is “all these cuts are Gordon Brown’s fault, and you’d be cutting this yourself if you’d won the election”. To the right sort of person, that line of argument becomes more persuasive when Labour aren’t clearly justifying their positions.

Personally I buy the narrative that (i) the financial crisis was mainly due to contagion from the USA, (ii) graphs don’t lie – Britain’s debt wasn’t at historically high levels in 2008, and (iii) Gordon did the right thing in bailing out the banks. But I’m not hearing a more nuanced message from the left than simply “fight the cuts”. Maybe Labour people think if they complain loudly enough about the cuts for the next 5 years, people will blame the whole lot on the Coalition and vote Labour again. I honestly don’t think this will be enough.

Timor celebrates World Toilet Day

A few weeks back it was World Toilet Day (Loron Mundial Sintina). Incidentally, I started work at WaterAid on that day back in 2007, so it also marked 3 years service for me. As you can imagine, WaterAid Timor Leste was pretty busy on the day. Most of the team were in Liquiça district to support a village to declare itself Open Defecation Free (ODF), which is a key element of the CLTS approach I mentioned in this post.

An ODF declaration is an important milestone in a village’s commitment to sanitation. It is a clear public statement, complete with signboard, that “practising open defecation” (apologies for jargon, it basically means crapping in the woods) is no longer acceptable and everyone is now using a toilet, however basic. The problem, of course, is how to get people to progress from the most basic toilet to something more durable. For more info on the event, I suggest you read this article on the WaterAid Australia website by my colleague Jose Seixas.

So, most of the team were down in Liquiça, but Jose, Tofik and myself were in Dili attending the National Toilet Awards. This excellent event was organised by the Ministry of Infrastructure and BESIK (the AusAid-funded programme supporting the water supply and sanitation directorate of the Ministry). They had  mustered NGOs and private sector organisations involved in sanitation marketing from across the whole of Timor. The Vice Minister of Health was in attendance to inspect the various designs, giving some political weight to the proceedings.

Most people had the basic moulded cement pans, though prices ranged from $3-5 due to different business models and material availability. There were also some other innovative designs on show. WaterAid had supported Januario (mentioned in this post) to attend, and he brought along a few examples of a simple latrine made from a PVC pipe, and ended up winning a prize for it, which was great. The picture above shows him with part of his display. PVC is currently quite expensive here as it's imported, but prices for many materials are coming down at the moment.

These awards are great for generating interest around sanitation marketing, rewarding those entrepreneurs with good ideas, encouraging them to stick with the business and innovate more. Hopefully it will become an annual fixture. A video was made, and if it becomes available online, I’ll link to it.

I was particularly taken by the exposition of the soap-making activities supported by the Japanese NGO AFMET, who work out in Lospalos. They are helping communities produce high-quality soap made mostly from local materials like coconut oil. Their soap is also available in shops in Dili, so I’ve been using it myself. Hygiene promotion is the most cost-effective health intervention available, but hand-washing only forms a proper disease transmission barrier when soap is used. I think AFMET’s scheme is great and I’m going to try and do a full blogpost on it another time – you can read about it on the second page of this PDF.

Happy belated World Toilet Day!

The problem and politics of language

East Timor has many languages, both local and externally imposed. As described in my history post, East Timor was colonised by the Portuguese about 500 years ago. Consequently the “official” language (meaning the language of law and educated people) was Portuguese. The Indonesian invasion changed everything – the speaking of Bahasa Indonesia was enforced in schools and official business. Consequently, most people now speak it.

In practice however, the Timorese have always spoken their own languages amongst themselves the whole time, and the lingua franca is arguably Tetun rather than Bahasa. Tetun is essentially a creole of various local languages with many words borrowed from Portuguese. Everyone in Dili speaks Tetun, but the further away you go, the more local languages become the mother tongue. There are in fact more than 30 languages in the various districts (see map above). Less educated people will only be able to speak their local language, and will not even understand much Tetun.

All this makes things extremely complicated, not to mention political. After independence from Indonesia, Portuguese was chosen as the official language, a controversial decision for many. After all, what’s the point in choosing a language which only educated people over 50 can speak? One might note that the political elite at the time was composed of these people. Many exiled independence leaders spent the 80s and 90s overseas in Portugal or Mozambique.

Even the most optimistic lusophile would admit that less than 5% of the population speak Portuguese. To be fair however, what was the alternative? Bahasa is widely spoken, but to choose it would have been politically unpalatable. Some people say “why not English?” but even fewer people speak English than Portuguese.

Why not Tetun, then? Put simply, it does not have enough words. Written Tetun (which has no agreed form, by the way) borrows huge numbers of words from either Portuguese or Bahasa. It would be impossible to draft complicated laws in Tetun. It is also not used anywhere else in the world, so would not be great for business, whereas Portuguese is at least spoken in a large number of countries, including emerging global power Brazil.

So in the end, they chose Portuguese, for better or for worse. This is already bringing serious complications – MPs are legally obliged to speak Portuguese in parliament but most cannot. I personally haven’t heard a single Timorese speaking it. In theory, Portuguese has been the language used in schools since independence, but in practice very few teachers can speak it well. So, lots of kids are learning in bad Portuguese. Their parents can’t speak it, so kids can’t get help with their homework. As the children who started school since 1999 get older, it will become even more complicated. University-level books are mostly in Bahasa, and all the lecturers are used to teaching in Bahasa. The list of problems goes on. It’s an educational nightmare, and it will take a long time to sort it out.

(I’m extremely glad that I did a beginners course in Tetun at the Dili Institute of Technology, which I would thoroughly recommend to anyone coming here, by the way. Tetun is a really interesting language and, thankfully, it’s incredibly simple. I’ll do it proper justice in a full post sometime soon.)