Dili #1 – Introduction to East Timor’s capital town

Dili is the capital town of East Timor. I say town rather than city, because it really is a rather small place. There are only a couple of buildings over 3 stories, and in fact the vast majority of buildings are bungalows. This fact is most striking when you enter the port by boat – the few big churches are the only things which stick out.

Despite Dili’s small town feel, urbanisation is happening extremely rapidly as the economy expands, and the streets are filling with cars and motorbikes. This is perhaps a sign of “development”, or perhaps a sign of ballooning government budgets and therefore lucrative contracts for anyone with the nous to set up a new business. I’m writing a separate post on the rapid urbanisation of Dili, so I’ll say no more on that at the moment. It will suffice to say that the 2010 Census found that c.200,000 people living in urban Dili district. Its population is growing by 4.8% a year – it may not sound like a lot, but that means its population doubles every 16 years (!). For an urban planner, that’s a scary prospect.

So, Dili is the capital, and it has been for since 1769 when the Portuguese moved their centre of government there. Architecturally, they didn’t leave much to speak of. The only striking Portuguese-era building I’ve come across is the Palaçio Governo, with its large open courtyard and monument to Prince Henry the Navigator. A large proportion of buildings were torched during the various bouts of violence, but particularly in 1999 and 2006 (see history post again) and even now many burnt-out shells remain. However, frenetic building work is taking place all over town, and many of the burnt-out shells in good locations have signboards outside saying what is going to be built there eventually.

Despite its capital status and rapid growth, Dili still has a small town feel – people are friendly and it has a very relaxed atmosphere compared to the bustling crowds (and overwhelming smells) of other Asian cities. There’s a long seafront and beach of sorts (sunbathing not recommended) which is somewhat spoiled by the bloody great port right in the middle of town. About 10 mins cycle out of town you come to a lovely beach which gets pretty busy with malae and richer Timorese at the weekends.

You can tell when you’re getting further out of town as the kids start shouting “hello mister” and “malae! malae!” (foreigner! foreigner!). There are so many malae in central Dili that kids that live in town got bored of that years ago. Speaking of foreigners, Dili is absolutely crawling with malae, many doing jobs like myself, i.e. “counterparts” for Timorese NGO staff new to their jobs. There are also hundreds of UN bureaucrats, UN police, and a host of young Australian volunteers. Maybe the UN contingent will scale down a little when the mission ends in 2012 (at least in theory), but the NGOs and donor agencies will be here for some time.

Most spare wall space is scrawled with gang names and other random graffiti (see previous post) which, I suppose, brings down the tone a bit. In the past few weeks I’ve seen increasing amounts of Timor Telecom advertising being painted on previously graffito’d walls. I’m not sure which is worse (a blog post laying into monopolistic Timor Telecom to come another time…) – at least the graffiti is socially interesting, if mostly ugly.

There’s quite a lot of urban agriculture, with various areas even in the government ministry area people are growing  vegetables or kangkung, which is good as it means there’s somewhere for water soak away. All the building work going on is potentially a big problem. As more areas get concreted over, the worse the flooding situation is going to get (see this post).

It seems I’m finding it hard to do justice to Dili in a single blog post, which is only to be expected, so let’s say this is just a brief picture, and a start of a series of posts on Dili…