This piece was written by SEASP PhD student Leong Kar Yen during his half-year sojourn in the fledgling nation of Timor Leste in 2006. He works on human rights issues in Timor.
I could hardly believe that it was a university. The building was a simple single-storey edifice painted in white and blue. The university was referred to as UNPAZ or the University of Peace. I was curious what the local universities here looked like and I was just following Rogerio to see if the campus had reopened. Rogerio was taking his first degree there in law and we went there after he heard from his friends that his faculty might be conducting classes again.

Rogerio, like many of his generation has spent a good part of his life fighting against the Indonesian occupational forces and because of that, his university education became a casualty of war. Now I think he is trying to reclaim that part of his life lost and universities like these have been acceding to the needs of more mature students such a Rogerio.

We rode cautiously, as he slowly negotiated the road leading to the university from the office. The neighbourhoods that we passed through were some of the most hard hit by he violence in the past few weeks. Some had been burnt down and there were vans which in their previous lives used to be mikrolets over turned and charred beyond recognition.

I had an uneasy feeling passing these barrios. There were always groups of people sitting idly and simply not doing anything. I make it a point so say hello with a smile on the bike as I rally did not know what was going through the head of these people. Violence, I feel, while usually planned, take on a life of its own after someone initiates it. The neighbourhoods I pass through with Rogerio are poor set against a hill. Somehow I thought it was going to rain but it didn’t.

The reluctantly dying sun and the grey clouds made for a dramatic sight. However I was more concerned more with where we were going. Twenty minutes later Rogerio drove into a field with nothing but smallish wooden houses and flanked by a building painted in blue and white and another half completed building waiting patiently to be dressed in a fresh coat of paint.

Later Rogerio begins talking to one of the lecturers at in the library and I browse through what cannot be more than four bookshelves of books. In one shelf, there is a collection of recently completed theses by undergraduates totalling 30 or so and on another was the collection of Mahathir Mohamad’s thoughts given to the University through the good offices of the Malaysian embassy. I was thinking if perhaps they were teaching a course on Mahathir.

I was glad to find that they had an introductory book on anthropology but nearly nothing else. I could count the books and I don’t think they would have any more than between one hundred to two hundred books. In the corner of the library was what would be the only computer in the entire university.

The buildings were empty. There is no one around but I think most of the people attached to the university have yet to return to the university. The situation of the barrios surrounding the university don’t aren’t really conducive to people coming in and out.

Most of us in normal countries take all this for granted. We are so used to the ease in which we run in and around our universities getting all the resources we need that we are unaware that somewhere somehow, it is almost a struggle to for someone to obtain a university.

After one of the lecturers there was done speaking to Rogerio. I began asking him some questions about the university.

“We have about a thousand five hundred students but now because of the situation, they haven’t been coming back but I have been trying to carry on with my teaching load.”Joao, his, name was wistfully looking around. Sad that the university was empty but still glad on the other hand that it had not been destroyed by arsonist and or looters.

“Gosh if you look at what happened to Universities like UnDil (University of Dili) and DIT (Dili Institute of Technology) we are a lot better off than they are. Nobody has taken anything from us not even a broken piece of wood.

“But if you look at what happened at the other universities, people have looted all the chairs, causing damage to the classrooms. In one of these universities I even saw people coming in with bicycles, tying several of these folding chairs around them and then just taking off like that. In that sense we are very lucky.”

I guess in away they have been lucky. But like all other universities in the world, UNPAZ also worries about its funding. Most of the subjects they taught at the university consisted only of economics, management, the social sciences and the arts. Subjects on the sciences or the more technical topics would be an undue burden on their coffers.

“It was crazy, there was this lecturer who has a masters and he requested 15 dollars an hour. Then this other person was asking us to give him 25 dollars an hour. And the locals when they teach only get two dollars an hour. How would this work out? Most of our funding comes from the students but now because of this situation that we are in some people have not been paid for along time. “

I could discern a faint tinge of dissatisfaction. Joao kept harping on the unequal treatment being meted out which placed foreigners on the higher side of the equation. He constantly used the term pribumi to somehow imply how that the Timorese should not be treated this way.

Joao mentioned that while some people have been coming in to teach on a voluntary basis, the volunteer couple later discovered that they needed cash to survive.

“I had already said to them very clearly that if we could pay we would but if not there is nothing we can do about it. So they taught for a few months or so but when they found out that they we were not able to pay them the money, they decided not to give the students an examination.”

“This made the students so angry that they wanted to beat these particular lecturers up.”

I was also told by a friend who taught at the National University of Timor Leste, that plagiarism was so widespread and this was caused by lecturers who did not care about their students and arbitrarily gave grades without even looking at the papers.

This attitude has given rise to corruption and sometimes even violence. University students during the Indonesian military occupation \ were known to assault their lecturers should they receive a mark which they ‘did not deserve’.

“Another problem we have in Timor is that we started all these universities much too fast and now most of them have folded. They thought it would be easy and good business but evidently not, these people just did not think about the future,” Joao continued.

As it is, there is already so much difficulty gaining well qualified staff. For UNPAZ, there were a staff of around 25-30 for 1500 students and out of the 30 only 5 would have PhD’s. Most of the teaching staff are only armed with a Bachelors degree.

Imagine that you were not able to finish your education for whatever reason, and then wanting to continue later on, you should walk into a classroom with the lecturer teaching being one of your classmates in Uni.

This happens a lot in Timor. Sometimes the students would even know more than the lecturer about a particular topic and the lecturer in turn feels intellectually intimidated. In one instance I was told by another friend from Hak that when his supervisor could not see eye to eye with him on the methodology used, his thesis proposal was thrown across the room and then ripped apart.

“Its all ego,” my friend told me.

Ok, I think its time to go. It was getting dark and everyone gets jittery when it starts to get dark. The five of us, Rogerio, me, his lecturer, his child and the student all hop on our respective bikes and take off. We part ways at a junction further down the road and everyone heads off to their own destinations.

On our way back to my place, Rogerio stops the bike and speaks to a group of ten adolescent males. He asks them, “Is the road down that way safe?” To which they answer almost in unison, “Ya ya its safe but in a little bit we are going to start taking those iraks on,” meaning that this group of teenagers were probably going to start throwing rocks at another group, probably from the country’s eastern part.

As we head off leaving these adolescent males to whatever machinations they had in mind, passing more burnt houses and cars on the way, I thought to myself, universities and education in Timor, they don’t really matter.

The Timorese are so intent on tearing their country, why would the heady ideals of education be worth anything to anyone? Even if you were educated, what would you do with a degree in a country so poverty riddled and chaotic? Well I guess we would have to begin somewhere. Those burning and destroying are somewhat of a minority and there are people who genuinely care and even as they are tired, they carry on doing what they can. And hey, if that’s not a starting point what the hell is?

I put these thoughts out into the wind and let them float away as the bike whizzed past by cars on Rua Comorro. The evening air was cool and comforting. As I headed home for dinner with Rogerio, I looked forward to a good nights sleep and in the morning, a beautiful blue Timorese sky.