East Timor: End of Summer Report
Pooja Kumar

I spent my past summer working in Dili, East Timor in collaboration with Save the Children. My time in Timor constituted the most intensive learning experience I have had to date. While my work there did not completely mirror my stated plans, I never expected to become as fully immersed as I did in children’s health, emergency relief, and child rights issues.

I set out to East Timor with the intention of studying health care access of street children in Dili, the capital city. As a Save the Children staff member, I had a great network of both local and expatriate staff who made the “adjustment period’ fairly easy.

Dili, and much of the rest of the country, is still in shambles following the 1999 post-referendum violence in Timor. Buildings are largely burned and in ruins due to militia activities, an estimated 15 percent of the population is still living in refugee camps in West Timor, and a large majority of the population have witnessed or been displaced by violence over the past year. Because Indonesia controlled the entire island during their twenty-five year occupation, very few Timorese are trained for positions in service or government. There are twenty doctors in the entire country, and the government is entirely run by the United Nations.

This was the situation when I arrived in Dili in early June, and it continues to be the case now.

While I had initially expected to focus entirely on street children during my time in Dili, in reality my work centered on three separate projects, each focusing on war-affected children in different ways.

The first was village-based assessments of the state of maternal and child health, and the creation of a plan for a national maternal and child health outreach program. This project was an incredible opportunity, because it allowed me to put my academic training in international health into practice. It also taught me a lot about community-based health in a post-conflict situation, where health issues were exacerbated by the levels of violence and displacement that had occurred after the 1999 referendum.

The second major project I worked on was assessing the state of street children in Dili. Throughout my time in East Timor, I worked specifically with a group of seven street children, documenting their lives and speaking with them about their problems and their individual situations. My work with these children was one of the major things that made it so difficult to leave Dili—they taught me not only about their country and their lives, but about communication in general. One facet of this project was teaching them about photography, and giving them disposable cameras, which they used to document various facets of their lives.

The third project I worked on was creating an assessment structure for a psychosocial program which Save the Children was beginning to put in place in conjunction with the International Rescue Committee and Christian Children’s Fund. This involved conducting intensive village assessments of children’s psychosocial well-being, especially in regards to recovery from the conflict situation. This research ended in an extensive report written up for Save the Children, as well as lots of documentary photography in the villages themselves.

My work in East Timor, then, grew into something much more diverse than I had imagined. In hindsight, I realize that the diversity of the experience taught me various lessons about the various aspects of international health (and especially children’s health) as well as how international health fits into the even more complex framework of relief and development.