Dedicated: East Timor’s Prime Minister, Xanana Gusmao, his wife, Melbourne-born Kirsty Sword Gusmao, and their children Alexandre, Kay Olok and Daniel at home in Dili.
MATTHEW NEWTON
Kirsty Sword Gusmao is composed, sipping Timor coffee as phones ring, emails ping, and people come and go outside her door. It’s just turned 9am on a humid summer’s day in Dili,
the crowded, noisy capital of her adopted country, East Timor.
The Victorian-born Sword Gusmao has organised breakfast for her family, sat for a photo shoot, packed her husband, Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, off to work and driven her three sons to school through Dili’s chaotic traffic.
She’s made sure her two employees are organised for the day and is now sitting in her office in the family’s secure residential compound, answering my questions in English and fielding calls on her mobile phone in perfect Portuguese.
Outside, UN police guard the heavily fortified compound, a legacy of the rebel attacks in 2008 that saw the Prime Minister narrowly escape injury but President José Ramos-Horta critically wounded.
Sword Gusmao responded to the attacks by demanding less security for herself, not more. She now drives her children to school herself, and rides her bicycle alone twice a week along Dili’s foreshore.
“It is very much linked to the fact that a few months after the assassination attempts in 2008 I decided that I didn’t want to have to put up with having personal security any longer, after seven years of doing so. Being trailed constantly by police, both Timorese and UN,” she said.
“There was a bit of concern at the time about that. But I just really felt that I didn’t want my kids to have to be clambering over automatic weapons to get into the car to go to school. And I just wanted to reclaim my life and my privacy and a sense of normality about my life. I drive my kids to school, like every other mum.”
The 45-year-old tries to keep things as normal as she can for sons Alexandre, 10, Kay Olok, 8, and Daniel, 6. They go snorkelling on the beaches around Dili, and visit Australia at least once a year for a summer holiday with Sword Gusmao’s mother Rosalie, who lives in Rosebud. In Victoria, the boys run amok on the beach and play with their cousins and their mother sneaks off to the movies, anonymous for a precious short time.
But in reality, it’s not easy being the first lady of one of the poorest countries in south-east Asia, born fewer than 10 years ago out of 500 years of occupation and 25?years of oppression by the Indonesian government.
“Obviously when you start the nation-building process from scratch less than 10 years ago there’s lots that still needs to be done and lots of frustration that we haven’t achieved more in a shorter space of time,” she said.
“It’s hard to take a step back and say, ‘oh, we have done a lot of good things’.
“And probably the major achievements would be in terms of building the basic institutions of state and nation (the judiciary, police and army, education system, health system – with shortcomings still) but they’re all basically operating and rolling out services.
“It really was from scratch, from the ground up, ground zero.”
The Kirsty Sword Gusmao story is a remarkable one. She was born in Melbourne, raised in Melbourne and Bendigo and graduated from the University of Melbourne with an honours degrees in arts. She also spoke fluent Italian and Indonesian. That led to a role as a member of the resistance working to free East Timor, known locally as Timor-Leste, from Indonesian rule, and that in turn led to a love affair with jailed resistance leader Xanana Gusmao, after romance bloomed through their letters.
They married in 2000 after Gusmao was freed from an Indonesian jail and set about the task of rebuilding a country shattered by violence after the referendum vote for independence.
Sword Gusmao has devoted her life to raising her sons and improving the lives of women and children in East Timor, a beautiful, hardy country that suffers from poverty, a lack of educational opportunity and a history of political instability and violence.
She works at a pace that would flatten many others, and faces an endless struggle for resources.
And with her 64-year-old husband coming under intense pressure to stand for election again in 2012, there’s little chance their respective workloads will ease any time soon, despite Gusmao’s oft-repeated wish to retire to become a pumpkin farmer.
“I know already there’s a lot of pressure mounting on him to consider running again,” she said. “To be honest, I haven’t even asked him because I think it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion, really, partly as an extension of … a general recognition of the fact that, despite incredible problems and shortcomings, his party’s doing a pretty good job, and it would be a shame to cut that short.”
Sword Gusmao is more concerned that the 2012 election could see political unrest or violence, which would mar the several years of peace the country has enjoyed.
“The problems previously were political, and I think it’s a question of appealing to the leaders of the country to never allow that situation to arise again,” she said. “The consequences are too dire and far reaching.”
Day to day, Sword Gusmao spends her time working on two main projects – the Alola Foundation, which empowers and supports women, and a UNESCO-backed campaign to have children taught in their native or mother tongue – no easy task in a country with 16 recognised languages and almost as many more dialects.
To many Australians, East Timor is the place they see on the TV news, beset by violence, refugees fleeing to the hills, dislodged by political violence.
But progress is being made. East Timor had one of the fastest-growing economies in the region last year, more than 10 per cent; child and mother mortality rates are falling. The Dili branch of the ANZ Bank has reported large numbers of people opening new accounts in the past five years as residents enjoy unprecedented prosperity.
A census in 2010 showed the population had risen to almost 1.1 million.
The beaches are being cleaned of rubbish, and Dili’s streets are jammed with traffic as a growing middle class contributes to its booming population. The capital had about 120,000 residents when the Indonesians left in 1999 – now, according to Sword Gusmao, it’s somewhere in excess of 200,000.
“More than it can cope with,” she acknowledged.
She remains concerned about the high number of children in East Timor’s remote and rural areas who received no schooling at all.
“It’s hard for kids to get to school. They have to walk kilometres under the hot sun to get there. Economic reasons are a big (problem). Parents may appreciate the importance of education, but if they’ve got six kids and they have to provide shoes so those kids can walk all those kilometres to get to school, provide the uniform and all the other costs associated with keeping kids at school, that can be really prohibitive for a lot of families.
“There’s also the quality of the education. Some are being taught in very inadequate circumstances,” she said. “The school may not have a roof, or it may have a leaking roof, or they may not have a blackboard or enough chairs for all those students. The teacher may not turn up, and if the teacher turns up, they may not have any training and the instruction they are providing may not be up to scratch.”
For the past two years, Sword Gusmao has worked to convince East Timor’s politicians to allow children to be taught in their own language.
“There’s been a very strong emphasis on teachers using Portuguese as the language of instruction,” she said. “Portuguese and Tetum are the two official languages of the country but Tetum, being the lingua franca, the national language, doesn’t enjoy the same status as Portuguese so it’s kind of being relegated to poor second cousin of Portuguese, really.
“And this has really damaged the quality of teaching, because the teachers themselves have a very poor command of Portuguese and they’re being asked to teach in it and, number two, the kids cannot understand what the teachers are trying to teach them. This is a fundamental problem in a lot of developing countries.
“What we are doing at the moment is we are obliging kids, from the first day they start primary school, to understand new content, a whole new foreign learning environment – they’ve probably never seen a book in their lives when they enter school – and they’re doing all of that in a foreign language,” she said.
“We’re really hoping this year to get the government to approve this (mother-tongue) policy. We’ve sacrificed one generation probably already to the current policies, we have to make sure we don’t do it to another.”
In the Gusmao home, Alexandre, Kay Olok and Daniel speak English as their first language, although their parents speak Portuguese to each other, and everyone speaks Tetum. Sword Gusmao chats to her 5000 Facebook friends mainly in Tetum. “The boys speak English to Xanana,’’ Sword Gusmao said.
“The idea was they were going to grow up bilingual – English and Portuguese. But Xanana was, number one, hardly ever present, so they just weren’t hearing Portuguese and, number two, he didn’t stick to the rules, which was to speak to them exclusively in Portuguese, because they would protest strenuously when he tried to speak in Portuguese to them because they couldn’t understand.
“And rather than persisting, he would just switch to English. They now speak Tetum and English. Their Tetum’s not fantastic but it’s a darn sight better than their Portuguese. I said to Xanana that this year our New Year’s resolution is you are going to speak Portuguese at least some of the time with the boys.”
Sword Gusmao admits time to herself is a rarity, and that she manages to read books for fun only when she’s in Australia visiting her mother.
She said her twice-weekly bike ride, where she puts in her earphones, turns the music up loud and rides hard along the waterfront for 50 minutes, is one of the few breaks she gets. “I don’t even hear people calling out to me, I just go into my own little space and my own little world,” she said. “And, of course, it’s good for the body as well as the brain.
“We don’t have a situation where we have meals together, it’s just impossible. The boys get up at different times, so breakfasts are staggered and I don’t usually even sit down for mine, I get up and grab a bite as I fly past between one thing and another, packing up my computer ready to bring over here,” she said.
“Is it glamorous? Not at all. But it’s what you make it. I could be a lady of leisure and spend my days in beauty parlours, but I’d consider that to be a huge waste of my time. You know you have this unique opportunity to be able to bring about some change, so why waste it?”
When she’s in Australia, Sword Gusmao takes a break from the responsibilities that weigh heavily on her as first lady.
“One thing I love when I hit Australia is the ability to just go to a public place, go shopping, and not be recognised, not having everyone coming and greeting me and passing on messages to Xanana,” she said.
“Occasionally I’ll be recognised in Australia but on the whole, it’s a place where I can disappear, and I like that.”
Ten years ago, Sword Gusmao’s attention was focused on her Alola Foundation, which improves women’s lives through advocacy, schooling, health support and providing economic opportunity.
Now it employs more than 100 people – all but one of them Timorese – and has representatives in every district of East Timor and in Australia. Sword Gusmao has been able to take a step back from the day-to-day work of Alola and concentrate on raising funds for it.
“Alola has gone from strength to strength over the years, in fact this year we celebrate 10 years since the establishment of the organisation,” she said.
Other matters occupying Sword Gusmao’s thoughts have been Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s controversial claim that an offshore asylum-seeker processing centre could be established in East Timor.
“I have to stress this is my personal view,” she said.
“My feeling at the time was that it wasn’t really appropriate to be foisting this problem on Timor-Leste when it’s grappling with so many other bread-and-butter issues. And that really it could potentially put East Timor in a very tricky situation politically, given the relationship with Indonesia.”
Sword Gusmao likened the proposal to the World War II decision to land an Australian commando force in previously neutral East Timor – a move that triggered bloody retaliation by the Japanese.
“The thought that came into my mind when I first read about it was, here we are again.
“In the Second World War, we (Australia) sacrificed East Timor to our national interest of defending our nation from the foreign hordes, and here we are wanting to do it again. That was my first reaction, that recollection of the Second World War situation, Timor being the buffer state.
“I think in practical terms it just wouldn’t have been feasible to. It was very strange.”
» www.alolafoundation.org
www.alola.org.au