To share my highlights and reflections from a year volunteering in Timor-Leste through Volunteer Service Abroad (VSA). I have a separate post on what I did during the year.

Highlights

Exploring a beautiful country rarely visited by tourists, and sharing the experience through books, social media, articles, and radio and podcast interviews. I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to be creative and make a contribution to promoting Timor-Leste as a travel destination.

Really getting to know a place, its people, language, and culture. Most days the only malae (foreigner) I would see would be my partner. Both HAMNASA and the Ministry of Tourism, where I volunteered, were almost entirely Timorese, and it was a pleasure working with them.

Hiking where almost no malae have been before, around the hills of Dili and on five incredible multi day adventures, on Atauro Island with Jhoky, and across Timor-Leste with local tour operator Eco Discovery.

Riding a motorbike, something I had zero interest in before Timor-Leste but it turned out to be an exhilarating and terrifying experience dodging the Dili traffic, and tackling increasingly bad roads the further I got from the capital.

Learning new skills in middle age, including drone flying, video filming and editing, TikTok, YouTube, riding a motorbike, writing and publishing books, learning a language, and generally being outside of my comfort zone in so many ways every day, which was challenging, exhausting, and rewarding.

Reflections

This has honestly been a life changing experience on so many levels. I feel like Pandora’s Box has been opened and things can’t be the same again. In particular a year volunteering in Timor-Leste has changed my perspective on…

Travel

Slow travel is an increasingly popular approach to having richer travels experience, and reducing your carbon footprint, through staying longer in places. The idea appealed but I wasn’t sure what I would do as a full time tourist. Turns out that spending a year volunteering overseas is the ultimate in slow travel. I had the time and opportunity to explore the country, connect with locals, and contribute to communities, in ways that would be hard as a tourist. If I lived in Timor-Leste, most of the jobs for malae are with international organisations, which would give a different perspective to the Timorese organisations I volunteered with.

A year was long enough to experience the seasons, festivals, and rhythms of life in Timor-Leste, learn some of the local language Tetun, make friends in both Timorese and expat communities, and visit almost every part of the country. I’ve done what would be considered adventure travel before (hiking for a month through remote parts of the Himalaya, solo travel through Syria), but Timor-Leste was next level in terms of the lack of travel information and infrastructure.

I took two overseas trips during the year, a week in Australia’s Northern Territory and two weeks in Indonesia exploring Java and Bali. These were the sort of trips I’d done many times before, but after being in Timor-Leste I found them underwhelming for a number of reasons. There were other tourists! Which is a novelty in Timor-Leste, where it would be rare for me to see other malae, particularly outside of Dili or Atauro Island. The flipside of this though was that Australia and Indonesia had tourist infrastructure, like signage, decent roads, public toilets, and travel information, which were useful…

I prefer experiences to sights. I often enjoy an average sight to myself more than an amazing sight shared with many other people. I got more satisfaction out of exploring small rural churches in Timor-Leste than visiting Litchfield National Park in Australia. What I enjoyed most in Indonesia was wandering around the local streets taking in daily life and small shrines or mosques, rather than the popular tourist sights. One of the highlights of living in Dili has been exploring the city on foot, getting a feel for every neighbourhood.

It will be difficult to repeat the Timor-Leste experience, but I’ve learnt so much, including about myself, that I can apply to whatever I do, whenever I do it in the future.

Work

I’ve almost always worked for large organisations, in both the private and public sector, so working for a small local NGO (with around 40 staff) was a very different experience. I enjoyed being hands on, and focusing on what needed to be delivered, working with a small group of people, rather than dealing with layers of governance, and endless meetings. It’s going to be very hard to return to an 9-5 office job after this…

In the tourism space Timor-Leste had a near complete absence of detailed travel information for visitors. Filling this gap has been my main focus this year, with social media, the Exploring Timor website, blogging, publishing books, magazine articles and podcasts. It has been such a pleasure being creative, and being my own boss!

Though it did turn what was a hobby, I’ve been running my blog JontyTravels for a decade now, into nearly full-time job as a content producer. At home in New Zealand I would go for a hike and take photos for my blog and Instagram. In Timor-Leste I would take photos (camera and drone) and videos (portrait format for TikTok and Instagram, and landscape for YouTube), followed by writing up the experience for the blog, the website, and the books, sorting the photos, and editing the videos. It would generally take longer to document an experience, than to have the experience in the first place, and given the amount I travelled this year I needed to keep on top of the content or risk being overwhelmed with the backlog.

I’ve loved it but am quite looking forward to just taking photos and creating content at a slower pace once I return home.

Health

I’ve been sick a lot in Timor-Leste, catching four tropical diseases (chikungunya, dengue, entamoeba infection, and typhoid), as well as viral infections and other illnesses. This despite having every vaccination available, being careful with food and water, and taking precautions against mosquitoes. Speaking to people who have lived here a few years, this is not uncommon with the first six months being the toughest, and then gradually adapting to the climate and living conditions.

Toward the end of my year here I went for a walk or hike almost every morning, and wondered why I didn’t do this for more of the year, given the physical and mental health benefits. I had to remember that I spent literally weeks in bed sick, and often struggled to just get through the day, during the six first months. I was also travelling a lot with HAMNASA, and exploring the country to create travel content and write the Exploring Timor-Leste guidebook.

As someone who has spent their life living in temperate countries (and moved from Auckland to Wellington for a cooler climate), living in a tropical country has been an exhausting experience. I soon realised that I couldn’t expect to do in a day what I might do at home, and needed to pace myself more. I’d typically go out in the mornings, to exercise and run errands, before spending the afternoons sat in front of a fan or air conditioning.

In addition to the climate, I found life in Timor-Leste challenging due to constant anxieties that I didn’t face at home. These were primarily the fear of being bitten by a dog (as I have a strong phobia and there are so many street dogs here), having a motorbike accident (as the roads are often awful, and there few driving rules), or getting sick with another tropical disease.
My learning is than when I’m able, to go for a hike or a run without excuses, and when I’m not, to accept the situation and figure out the best way to spend the time. It is easy to take your health for granted when you have it, but this year has made me appreciate how easily you can lose it.

What you need

Living in a least developed country gives a different perspective on what one needs. I’ve had more than most Timorese, but compared with living in a developed country this year has been the most materially deprived of my life. Terrible internet, no drinkable tap water, no running hot water, no dishwasher, no washing machine, no vacuum cleaner, power cuts, poor infrastructure for dealing with waste and stormwater, mostly awful roads, many large holes in pavements, endless street dogs, unsociably loud music at any time of the day or night, needing to wash fresh vegetables with vinegar to avoid getting sick, and highly bureaucratic government administration heavily reliant on knowing people.

Despite that fairly extensive list of challenges of living in Timor-Leste, there are certainly fewer I miss than I would have expected before I came here. Washing clothes by hand can be quite relaxing, getting drinking water out of a 19L bottles rather than the tap is fine, riding on bad roads certainly helps with focusing on where you’re going, battery packs and USB fans can help with power cuts, stockpiling food is manageable. There are solutions to most of the challenges, and while it does make life harder, it is nothing compared with the conditions that much of the population live in. I’ve stayed in homestays with dirt floors, leaky tin roofs, hole in the ground toilets, no electricity, and limited water supplies. I am super fortunate to have been born in a developed country, and foregoing a few of the benefits for a year has definitely been a price worth paying for the experience I’ve had here.

I’ve travelled in many poor countries, and a frequent comment I’ve heard from other travellers is how they envy how simple people’s lives can be there, and the often beautiful surroundings they call home. Having had extensive experience now in these environments I’m far less persuaded by this argument. Life is tough, and physically tiring without many of the conveniences we take for granted in the developed world. In Timorese culture a black flag is placed on the road when someone on the street dies, a marque is assembled and all the family members gather for a series of events. On my street of a dozen houses we’ve three deaths in a year, and it is rare not to come across black flags most days travelling around the city. It is hard to imagine this happening in New Zealand. It is easy to romanticise other people’s lives when travelling but the reality is far less glamorous and more challenging.