Imagine a group of Australian schoolgirls, clustered in the customs office of an international airport, their gear spilling all about them, playing solitaire and joking with the local security police.
It’s not the way travel goes these days. More usually it’s a business of anxious queues, searches, dogs sniffing, silent and armed inspectors. But there was nothing usual about this trip. And by the end, the girls were so inured to the unexpected that they took what came and made a feast of it. ‘When we first arrived in Dili, we wouldn’t have dared even speak to a policeman’, one of then tells me. ‘Too scared. We’d heard so much about troubles and violence. But by the end—well, it was just different.’
Very different. I’m listening to them, a few days after their return, gathered now in a formal, high-ceilinged room at school. It echoes a little as they all talk at once. The principal, Helen Toohey csb, is making tea, offering jellybeans, letting them unpack the experience.
Eight girls and three teachers from one Australian school took part in an experiment. Kilbreda College is a beachside Brigidine school and one-time convent in Mentone, Victoria, and this year it celebrates 100 years of educating young women. But these girls and their three teachers went away instead of staying home and congratulating themselves. They raised the money (degree of difficulty high), and went to East Timor, to the cities and out into the country. They visited schools, slept in dormitories, played basketball and volleyball with local kids, spoke English, taught some, tried to learn Tetum. They watched the reconciliation process in action. They met children, politicians, teachers, bus drivers, policemen, and the odd celebrity.
They tell me that they were astonished most by the affection and interest with which they were met. These are cool young women. And with Australian teenage coolness goes a certain inhibition of expectation. They don’t expect other people to take them on, don’t expect relationships to be built quickly. ‘But the things they said, they actually meant’, one of them tells me. ‘They’d say, “I send my love to your family”, and they’d actually mean it.’
Sometimes the girls’ reception was formal and a little overwhelming. The hour-and-a-half ceremonial welcome in Ossu astonished them. ‘We were treated like royalty.’ They look astonished even now, as though they are only just beginning to understand the rituals of a culture