As Honolulu Star-Advertiser reporter Kevin Knodell noted on November 12 (“Hawaii plays central role in ‘Pacific century'”), the East-West Center, based at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, continues to play a role in America’s “Pacific pivot.” But the EWC is much more than a place for diplomats to bump fists and shape foreign policy.
As I discovered during a recent visit to one of the world’s newest countries, Timor-Leste (also known as Timor-Leste), the scale of technology and expertise being transferred from Hawaii to Pacific nations as far away as the Pacific is impressive and inspiring.
During my stay in the capital, Dili, I spoke with several Timor-Leste EWC alumni, including a civil engineer, several tour operators, a filmmaker, a political scientist, and other entrepreneurs.
They all spoke enthusiastically about the various skills, know-how and technologies they had gained from their EWC internships and associated scholarships at the University of Hawaii. But it wasn’t just about what Timorese people could do for themselves; it was about what they could do for their country.
For example, Egidio da Purificação Soares, founder of Timor Sightseeing, interned with Roberts in Hawaii when he came to Honolulu on an EWC fellowship. He honed his transportation skills and navigated Honolulu using Google Maps. But when he returned to Dili, he noticed flaws in the app. Two-way streets were sometimes shown as one-way, and bridges across rivers seemed nonexistent. He told Google about this, and with the help of Timor-Leste’s Ministry of Tourism, they brought in the Google Street View team to fix the problem.
For Fatima Norberto, owner of Fatima Cafe in Dili, and tour guide Jonias Exposto, their internship in Waimea Canyon proved to be a tourism marketing test.
Norberto said Waimea Valley has been a big help in coming up with a plan to promote Timor-Leste coffee, the country’s largest agricultural product. “They’ve been extremely helpful with the basics – packaging, presentation and even putting together the daily menu,” she said.
After completing his training in Waimea Valley, Expost had the idea to start his own travel company, Timor Indigenous Tours. “When I came back from Hawaii, I knew how to use QuickBooks, I knew how to design my own brochures, I knew how to create my own website,” Expost says.
Dili-based filmmaker and media consultant Francesca Maya was awarded an EWC scholarship in 2004 to hone her skills in writing, directing, editing and storytelling at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “Plus, being in Hawaii helped me reconnect with my culture and identity,” she says. Why? Because as a young woman, during Indonesia’s brutal occupation of East Timor, “thinking about culture and history was not an option,” she says.
Ariel Mota Alves, a doctoral student in political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, is studying the impact of carbon offsets in Timor-Leste. “What happens when poor farmers who previously made a living growing rice are able to plant rare woods like mahogany and teak and earn a decent income?” Alves explains. Trees are growing on land where food was grown. Alves wants to understand how this affects the food supply. He is trying to find the answer by tracking land use with advanced software from the University of Hawaii.
Crispen Fernandez is one of Timor-Leste’s most senior EWC graduates. Having earned his PhD in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2010, he has applied his skills to a variety of research and infrastructure projects, from hydrological studies in the city of Dili to wastewater analysis for the country’s irrigation schemes. He now spends much of his time mentoring younger staff, “which is the most enjoyable part of my job,” he told me.
He is using his engineering expertise to transition his family farm to green energy, installing solar power systems for water pumping and lighting. He keeps 50 cows, which help him create biofertilizer to grow vegetables and fruits like edamame and watermelon. The livestock also produce biogas, which he uses to make plant-based proteins like tofu and tempeh.
Fernandes’s ingenuity and creativity seemed to me to be typical of the Timorese I interviewed.
East Timor is not an easy place to grow up in: it’s an impoverished country that has yet to recover from the generational trauma caused by World War II and the quarter-century Indonesian occupation that followed, which left some 180,000 people dead.
This isn’t just a matter of Americans giving Timor-Leste plane tickets to Honolulu and scholarships: we can learn a lot from their resilience, optimism, and resourcefulness.
Rob Kay is a Honolulu-based author, East-West Center alumnus, and founder of fijiguide.com. He can be reached at robertfredkay@gmail.com.
