Our neighbours

Mark my words: We are living next door to one of East Timor’s undiscovered child stars. If there were a Timorese Children’s Musical Theatre Society, this youngster would get a scholarship. Her set of lungs would outclass Shirley Temple’s and Orphan Annie’s combined. I think I can even hear a twangy American accent underneath her Baqueno (think a more exotic version of: “thaaa sun’ll-cahm auuut twoo-maahreow!”).

She also has regular “diva moments”. One Saturday morning recently, Wade and I were horrified to wake up in the too-early hours to a murderous sound – imagine said lungs filling with air and then letting out a blood-curdling scream that sounds something like an exclamation of utter disgust, anger and woe, all rolled into one massive holler, lasting as long as a “cock-a-doodle-dooo” (I know this, because the neighbour’s rooster felt that he was being out-cocked and decided to start joining in, in perfect harmony mind you, making him perhaps one of East Timor’s undiscovered poultry stars); a small window of silence, and then suddenly the little diva would strike up again - in total, approximately nineteen hundred times. Yes, we like to ease ourselves into our Saturday mornings in Oecusse.

We also think our neighbours might be running some sort of children’s boot camp over there, because there seems to be one phrase that we keep hearing, over and over again (coming from the mother/bootcamp instructor): NAO BEH! It seems that every second word that she speaks is “NAO BEH!”, and it appears to have, once again, a weird American accent, except this time the accent is more “white trash” than “Orphan Annie”. We originally thought that one of the kids’ names was NAO BEH!, but we’ve since figured out that “NAO BEH!” is the Baqueno term for “LET’S GO!”.

Because our neighbours never actually seem to go anywhere, we can only deduce that such frequent use of the term is in reference to some overly-strict exercise regime. And, like bootcamp, it starts before dawn, is often accompanied by hand-clapping in quick succession, and is followed by the little tuckers running around doing excessive amounts of heavy lifting.

I’ll tell ya, it’s a hard knock life!