Her Excellency Ms Inês Maria De Almeida, Ambassador for Timor-Leste, addressed our Club on Tuesday 13th October 2020. Ambassador Almeida's presentation follows.
Timor-Leste Ambassador Her Excellency Ines Almeida, with First Secretary to Her Excellency, Sam Soares (L) and President Desmond Woods (R).
TIMOR-LESTE EMBASSY IN AUSTRALIA
Her Excellency Ines Almeida, Ambassador of Timor-Leste to Australia - Address to Rotary Luncheon 13th October, 2020.
President Desmond Woods, Dear friends, I begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land we are meeting on, the Ngunnawal people, and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. I would also like to acknowledge and welcome other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who may be attending today’s luncheon.
Thank you to the Rotary Club of Canberra, and in particular President Desmond Woods for the invitation to address this luncheon. I was also delighted to hear that Jennifer Jones has been nominated as the first female President of Rotary International for 2022-23, the first woman in the organisation’s 115-year history.
I am humbled and honoured to be addressing you for the first time as Timor-Leste’s Ambassador to Australia, and for the opportunity to be amongst friends of the courageous people of Timor-Leste. The friendship between our two nations was forged during WWII when Timorese supported the brave Australian commandos fighting across our countryside. This friendship has developed over the years and I hope it can be strengthened further in the years and decades to come. There are deep and longstanding people to people relationships between our countries – and Rotary Club is an important part of this.
Let me express my deep gratitude to Rotary for providing assistance to my country, Timor-Leste since we began our first steps as a Nation. Given your track record in Timor-Leste, needless to say, we continue to count on your support. I was recently made aware of a Timorese grandmother, 81 years old, who has been a dedicated Rotarian for 20 years. Her grandson who is autistic joins her every Friday volunteering in Footscray in Melbourne. As you know many Rotary clubs have been working to assist the Government of TL, and in-country Rotarians, to provide education, healthcare, sanitation, training and administration to Timor Leste’s people. I know that there is still much more work to do particularly in rural areas of the country.
Today, I will focus on health, education and tourism. COVID-19 Around February/March 2020, at the start of the outbreak of COVID-19, our lives began to change. COVID changed the way we live, changed the way we communicate, changed the way we interact with families. It changed the way we live, perhaps for a long time. COVID-19 has brought profound negative effects on the world economy, and my tiny country, Timor-Leste was no exception. COVID-19 brought many difficulties, but overall, it exacerbated and highlighted many of the structural issues that exist. When the first imported case of COVID-19 was detected, the Government of Timor-Leste made its first decision to close the border and some flights.
Before COVID-19, our land border with Indonesia averaged 100 people coming through every day. The decision was based on the fact we did not have the facilities required to quarantine all arrivals. We had no PPE for our hospital staff coping with an outbreak of the disease, let alone for everyday citizens. This was an experience we witnessed in many other countries. In April, we established an Integrated Centre Crisis Management Unit, and a coordinated mechanism – not only Government but all development partners involved, to assist in equipping our health professionals with appropriate PPE (even though very scarce), holding daily press conferences, informing the community to wear masks and keep their distance, avoid public gatherings and so forth.
To date, we have only had 27 cases and none from community transmission. All 27 have now recovered and we are COVID-19 free – but the risks for our country remain exceptionally high. We have faced difficult challenges including how to properly handle infection prevention and control in the quarantine facilities, testing and treating suspected carriers in isolation and conducting random surveillance. Active Community surveillance was important in ensuring people are regularly washing their hands. Access to clean water and proper sanitation is critical as regular handwashing provides the simplest and most powerful defence against COVID-19. There have been a number of social impacts of COVID-19 in Timor-Leste. Many people have lost their jobs, high expenses, leading to stress to family members.
According to FONGTIL data (Timorese NGO), - 120 employers have been forced to cut the salaries of their workers or terminate staff - this has a huge impact in our small economy. Hotels have closed, restaurants have closed, domestic workers have been let go, our tourist industry is suffering. It has disproportionately affected women. 75-90% of vendors in the municipal and postu (village) markets are women. Travel restrictions have limited the ability to continue working and earning money for their families, which can lead to food shortages in the household. As a result of these increased stresses, we saw an increase in domestic violence during this period. In July, there were 243 cases of domestic violence reported, and many more go unreported.
In the rural areas, the number of women seeking ante-natal and post-natal care reduced significantly during COVID-19. Many women did not want to attend clinics because of the virus out of fear. However, in turn, COVID-19 brought out a spirit of solidarity in the distribution basic needs. People used a barter system to exchange items, such as rice and sweet potato in the neighbourhoods.
Just before the first state of emergency was declared in Timor-Leste, many left the capital to return to their home villages. Across the country, elders held ritual ceremonies to ask their ancestors for assistance in combatting COVID-19. Many conducted cultural traditional ceremonies to ask for protection. Several organisations travelled to these villages to share information. Technology played a significant role, with these ceremonies being shared amongst the Timorese community via social media. In the more fertile rural areas in the east of the country, where people retain access to a diversity of cultivated and wild foods, life was relatively unaffected.
DEVELOPMENT AREAS
In August this year, the Government released an Economic Recovery Plan, to map out the steps in helping the economy recover from COVID-19, but also to formulate policy measures that will aid in development over the next three years. The plan covers many areas from health, education, tourism and economic development. It is a people centred plan, focused on increasing local productivity for the benefit of communities.
Timor-Leste is a subsistence economy, with the majority of the population living off their own agricultural resources and facing many challenges. Timor-Leste remains very dependent on oil revenues and a significant part of employment and income comes from an informal economy. Timor-Leste is a country rich with beauty, culture and heritage. It is a stone’s throw from Australia which makes it a natural tourism destination for Australian holidaymakers.
Aside from the fact that Timor’s economy is suffering from the effects of COVID-19, tourism is an underdeveloped industry that has immense untapped potential, especially in the areas of eco and marine tourism, agri-tourism and historical and cultural tourism. Timor-Leste and Australia share deep historical ties – dating back to WWII. This is a part of history that many people forget about. There is potential to promote historical trekking and hiking through the many mountainous regions of the country, and areas of the resistance and former guerrilla hideouts Tourism in Timor-Leste is very small in number and limited. It is estimated that annual tourist arrivals are around 10,000 per year, with the most common country of origin being Australia (over 30%).
Since the beginning of 2020, the country’s hospitality and tourism sector has suffered a 95% reduction in sales revenue, due to reduced domestic consumption and a significant decline in the area of air, land and sea transportation. There is also the need to build capacity, especially among women and young people, to coincide with the development of the tourism industry. This includes hospitality, tour guides, accommodation services and customer service.
The level of training and qualification of our human resources is low. It should therefore be a priority to promote training courses (at a higher level, of long duration; but also, technical intensive of short duration) in specific areas of need for the country, including agriculture and livestock, engineering, mining, hospitality, etc. I have read about the many youth and vocational programs run by Rotary, including the New Generations Vocational Exchange Program.
There have been Timorese students that have had the opportunity to gain experience in Australia in various areas, including engineering, hotel management, hospitality. Currently, the labour market is lacking in terms of workforce qualification and understanding work ethics and responsibilities in the work place. This can only be rectified through greater investment in vocational training. However, English language barrier remains a challenge.
HEALTH - Since the restoration of independence, our health sector has made remarkable progress, but we still face substantial challenges in providing health services not only in the capital, but importantly in the Municipalities and remote areas. This means that too many Timorese are missing out on adequate healthcare and other critical services that provide for a dignified quality of life. Timor-Leste has many incredible partnerships that provide health assistance. Maluk Timor, East Timor Hearts Fund, and Menzies School of Health Research, Darwin for example, providing important capacity building assistance, not only during COVID-19 but also in the face of other prevalent disease in Timor-Leste, such as including Rheumatic Heart Disease and Tuberculosis.
Allow me to talk about a Timorese NGO, SABEH (Saude ba Ema Hotu - Health for everyone). They are a team of volunteers with scarce funding but very dedicated. They established in March 2019, providing outreach services to the rural and most remote areas. Their main objectives are to:
Ensure that all Timorese have access to quality healthcare services, including women, children, the disadvantaged and the disabled;
Promote education that creates and sustains healthier communities, through sustained focus on school health initiatives, and on highly prevalent risky behaviours, including tobacco and alcohol use.
SABEH is seeking to develop partnerships with other government and non-government organisations, and there is potential for collaboration with Rotary to achieve these objectives. Times are difficult for all of us right now. Australian’s are doing it tough. It is times like these the we appreciate the importance of community and sacrifice for the greater good. It is times like these that we need to come together and look after each other. And we must remember the impact of COVID-19 is going to hit developing countries the hardest.
The people in developing countries were already struggling before COVID-19 – now they face great challenges. That is why it is so important that we have organisations like Rotary that put service above self, that understand the importance of building communities and that have a strong international commitment to improve the lives of the least vulnerable in our region. The support and the work of Rotary in Timor-Leste makes a real difference to our people and I look forward to working closely with you into the future.
Thank you.