EAST TIMOR

READ

To the extent possible, I’m reading novels for this project. Merriam-Webster defines a novel as “an invented prose narrative that is usually long and complex and deals especially with human experience through a usually connected sequence of events.” In reading novels for this blog, I’m attempting to understand how people in other countries perceive the human experience from the standpoint of their cultural and geographical realities.

However, in many countries, it’s not possible to find a novel that’s been translated into English. For those countries, I just have to take whatever translated book I can get. With respect to East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, the book that I could get was a memoir by Luís Cardoso, The Crossing: A Story of East Timor.

The Crossing covers a crucial time in East Timor’s history. This island nation, situated between Indonesia and Australia, was a Portuguese colony for four centuries, enjoyed a brief period of independence following Portugal’s Carnation Revolution in the mid-1970s, but was then invaded by Indonesia and endured more than two decades of violent occupation by that country before finally becoming a sovereign state.

Cardoso’s memoir encompasses all of these changes to the country’s political landscape. He was born in 1958, at a time when Portugal still ruled the Timorese islands. Cardoso’s father was a nurse, and the family traveled to wherever his father’s services were needed. It was very important to his father that Cardoso be properly educated, so when Cardoso was still a young boy, he was sent to live with relatives on another island to begin his formal schooling at a Catholic mission. His grandfather took it upon himself to introduce Cardoso to the spiritual tradition of his ancestors. “He wanted me to know my own nature before seeing it forever submerged in the Christian world.”

Cardoso’s education proceeded in fits and starts. At one point, his father decided he should be a priest and sent him off to the seminary, even though the head of the school said he was “too fond of life to be of any use to God.” When the seminary didn’t work out for him, he decided to become a good enough student at the next school he attended to be awarded a scholarship to study in Portugal. He did, indeed, earn a scholarship, and he left East Timor for Lisbon just ahead of the turmoil that followed the Indonesian invasion.

In Lisbon, Cardoso met fellow Timorese refugees from the war in their homeland and became part of a cultural group that shared Timorese song, dance, and poetry with the people of Portugal. As the book draws to a close, Cardoso’s parents arrived in Lisbon, and he was forced to deal with the toll the war had taken on his father.

At times I found the narrative confusing, especially when it veered into political territory and got into the upheaval occurring in both East Timor and Portugal. But for most of the book, The Crossing was a look back at the author’s childhood in what must have seemed to him a simpler, more idyllic time.

COOK

The Crossing didn’t mention any specific Timorese dishes, but there were occasional references to the produce that is grown there, such as strawberries, persimmons, mangoes, rice, maize, cassava, tea, coffee, and cacao. It wasn’t difficult to find a vegan Timorese recipe online. Batar da’an is a simple dish made of butternut squash, corn, and kidney beans. I found the recipe on the Catholic Relief Services Rice Bowl website, which suggests preparing healthy, meatless recipes from around the world for Lent. Somehow, making a recipe recommended for Lent by a Catholic organization seemed appropriate, considering all the time Cardoso spent in Catholic schools. This was a quick, easy, and healthy recipe, and I enjoyed it.

GIVE

GlobalGiving listed four projects for East Timor, and they all sounded worthy. In the end, I picked one that is helping to revive traditional carving, weaving, and pottery skills in poverty-stricken rural communities and turning them into income-generating opportunities. Cardoso’s recollection about his grandfather schooling him in the spiritual tradition of his ancestors made this particular project very appealing to me, as it celebrates the local heritage. According to the description on the website, “[t]his project is part of our ‘Turning Traditions into Livelihoods’ program - an initiative that gives Timorese rural communities a chance to generate income and build a livelihood using their culture, identity and experience.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/turn-traditions-into-livelihoods-for-150-timorese/.

NEXT STOP: ECUADOR

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

READ

I had intended to read In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez, for my book about the Dominican Republic. When I looked up her biography, however, I discovered that she was born in the United States, so I’ll have to save that book for reading outside of this project. Instead, I turned to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, a book for which the author won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008.

The book follows the life of Oscar de León, who, along with his older sister Lola, is being raised by their single mother Beli in Paterson, New Jersey. Beli had fled the Dominican Republic for the United States in her teens to avoid being killed by goons hired by the wife of a man she was having an affair with. She begins a relationship with a man she meets on the plane on the way to the U.S., and from that relationship, Lola and Oscar are born. Their father isn’t in the picture for long, though, and he doesn’t make much of an appearance in the book.

For the most part, the story is told by a narrator who remains unknown until about halfway through the book, at which point he takes on a fairly prominent role. He appears to be intimately acquainted with the de León family, and from him we learn that Oscar is obese, unattractive, and obsessed with science fiction and fantasy books and movies. He is also desperate to have a girlfriend, which is unlikely to happen because he is obese, unattractive, and obsessed with science fiction and fantasy. He is bullied throughout high school and college, and the few girls he does interact with never want to be anything but friends. He attempts suicide twice, unsuccessfully, then has a life-changing experience during a trip to the Dominican Republic with his family.

While most of the book is about Oscar, there are also chapters about his sister, his mother, and his grandfather. In these chapters we learn, among other things, about the bad times in the Dominican Republic during the thirty-one-year dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. His was a particularly brutal regime, in which thousands of people were killed or imprisoned, and women were in constant fear of coming to Trujillo’s attention and being forced to have sex with him. The brutality and sexual appetite of Trujillo had brought about the downfall of Oscar’s mother’s once-prominent family, a family now thought by some to be cursed.

It took me some time to get into this book, partly because the author relies heavily on slang, in both English and Spanish, that’s not familiar to me and which I found distracting. The book is also kind of depressing, as the plot doesn’t contain many happy moments, and learning about the Trujillo dictatorship was horrifying. As I continued to read, however, I became invested in the lives of the characters and hoped the curse – or the fukú, as they called it – wasn’t real. But as the narrator says in the opening pages, “It’s perfectly fine if you don’t believe in the ‘superstitions.’ In fact, it’s better than fine – it’s perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you.”

COOK

The dish I chose to make for the Dominican Republic is unrelated to anything in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It’s a recipe for stewed red beans (habichuelas rojas guisadas) I found on the Dominican Flavor website, which, unfortunately, was suspended shortly after I made the dish. The beans were really good, though, and I don’t want you to miss out on making them, so since I can’t provide you with a link to the recipe, I’m copying it down below, to the best of my recollection:

Ingredients

1 lb. dried red beans

2 T. olive oil

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp. salt

2 stalks celery, chopped

1 onion, chopped

1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped

1 green bell pepper, seeded and chopped

2 green habanero peppers, seeded and chopped

1 cup acorn squash, peeled and cubed

1 cup cilantro, chopped

2 T. tomato paste

1 tsp. oregano

Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

Rinse the beans and soak them overnight in water that covers them by about three inches.

In a large pot, sauté the minced garlic in the olive oil, add the teaspoon of salt, and then add the beans and the water they soaked in. Bring them to boiling and then turn the heat down to medium high, half cover the pot with a lid, and let the beans cook for about an hour.

At the end of the hour, add all the vegetables to the pot. Mix the tomato paste with a little of the bean water and then add it to the pot, along with the oregano. Half cover the pot again with the lid, and let the beans cook for another hour.

If the beans start to dry out at any point along the way, add more water. When the beans are soft, but not mushy, taste them and add salt and pepper as needed. Serve the beans over white rice.

GIVE

Even though I didn’t read In the Time of the Butterflies for this blog post, I read about it in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It’s about the Mirabal sisters, three women who actively opposed the Trujillo regime and became martyrs to the cause when they were assassinated in 1960. They called themselves “las mariposas” – the butterflies -- which is why I chose the Mariposa Center for Girls to receive my donation for the Dominican Republic. The purpose of this project, which I found on the GlobalGiving website, is to create a center where “impoverished Haitian and Dominican girls come to engage in sports, receive academic tutoring, have access to libraries and computers, receive job and life skills training and health and wellness care.” More information about the Mariposa Center for Girls is available at http://www.mariposadrfoundation.org/mariposacenter.html.

NEXT STOP: EAST TIMOR