Food Security is a very big issue on the island of Timor-Leste. I believe the whole archipelago of Indonesia has issues with food security. Very often people get sick from contaminated food: Diarrhea, dysentery, dehydration, worms, amoebas, the works. I can’t even count how many times I’ve gotten “kabun moras”, and the Timorese people in my office and my host-family often complain of it. I have witnessed many other volunteers get really bad food poisoning, as well as one of the Cuban Doctors, and people from NGOs. It seems in America it is a rare occasion to get extreme diarrhea, but here it is almost apart of daily life.
To prevent constant food poisoning, there are several precautions you can take. Make sure your food is fresh, make sure you eat it hot, and if it is fruit or vegetables, make sure it has a peel, or clean it well before you eat it. Any meat or fish or eggs needs to be well cooked!! Always wash your hands before you eat or prepare food.
There are many reasons leading to the problem with food security. First, you have to get fresh food everyday. Almost no one has electricity 24/7 (except for “malae” run NGOs), so there are no refrigerators or freezers to keep your food fresh. You can’t go to the supermarket every Saturday and buy your groceries for the week. Usually you have to buy a little bit of food everyday. If it is only vegetables, you can use them for maybe two or three days. If it is fish or meat, then it has to be cooked right away and eaten the same day. The Timorese have little wooden cabinets where they store cooked food in dishes and little plastic thermoses. Sometimes they will leave meat in there for a few days, but they make sure to reheat it. But even reheating two-day-old meat can be dangerous. Also, if I were to go to a restaurant and order some chicken, it will definitely be hot, but I don’t know if that chicken was killed the same day, or has been sitting in a bowl for a week.
Reheating food is also a long process. There are no stoves or dishwashers. Most families only own one or two pots, and everything has to be cooked over a fire. So cooking anything can be a real pain in the butt. I learned this when I tried to make pancakes for my family in a wok over an open flame. It’s extremely hot and the smoke stings your eyes because there is poor ventilation inside their “dapur.” I come out coughing up a storm and covered in sweat. So it can be very likely that people are feeling “baruk” and don’t have the time or energy to reheat their food.
Getting fresh food everyday can be difficult and time consuming. It is usually a pretty long walk to the stores and market. You never really now what will be sold that day, and you have to take your time and be wary of what you buy. You don’t know how old the food they are selling is. Several times I have bought eggs on the street and found out later that they were already rotten. Its not that the Timorese want to make you sick or are trying to cheat you out of money, they just don’t have a very good concept of food safety. Several times my family has bought fish on the street from someone and found out later that it is not fresh. The fish-guy doesn’t want to make you sick, he just doesn’t know any better. Also, the farmers here don’t use any sort of pesticide. You will often find little creepy crawlers hanging out in your vegetables and fruit while you are preparing it. I like to make salads a lot and there is always someone hanging out inside my tomatoes (Be really careful when you buy bananas because scorpions like to hide out in between the fruit!).
Flies are another issue. I don’t think I have ever seen so many flies in my life. I don’t know where they all come from, but there are tons of them. And once the food is out on the table, they are ready to eat. The problem is that they just came from hanging out in the rice paddies and munchin on some cow dung. Then they come hang out on your rice and make you sick. You know that saying, “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”?? Well, you definitely don’t know where that fly has been, so “quidado.” The Timorese are smart and they place these little baskets over the food to keep the flies (and sometimes cats and chickens) off the food.
Also, you don’t know where people’s hands have been. The Timorese are not big on hand washing. In the U.S., if you are working in the fields and tending to cows all day, you wash your hands really well before you eat lunch. Here, not so much. People also like long fingernails, and you can see black lines of caked dirt inside the nails. Kids here don’t have much to play with, so they play with the chickens and the dogs, which are really, really dirty. Even when I tell the kids at my house to go wash their hands before I give them something to eat, I have to send them back a second time because they didn’t use soap. Also, soap costs money, which people don’t have a lot of. Most of all, with cintinas, you don’t use toilet paper, people just use their hands to clean their rears after relieving themselves. Most cintinas have soap and plenty of water, but you will find some that don’t have either. So you have to be really wary of who is handing you your food, whether at the market, in a restaurant, or are just eating food at home. I have seen people at the market put a chicken down and then hand someone some bread. Gross.
So basically, eating in Timor can be a real chore. I miss the days where I could come home, grab some food out of the fridge and make a sandwich, pop open an ice-cold coke, and eat my lunch worry-free.
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