EAST TIMOR: The new East Timor has a chance to be a shining example of 'due process' and democracy, writes David Shanks
"Dr Dan" Murphy is at his most passionate when describing the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on the resilient people of East Timor.
To get through the brutal 24-year occupation by the Indonesian military, a person had to develop a coping mechanism to avoid becoming "a blathering idiot on the streets". At any time, anywhere they could be taken, tortured, raped, killed.
But that mechanism meant an attitude of "not planning for the future, living for the moment and not taking responsibility for difficult decisions. It was as if someone told you 'you have got terminal cancer. You will be dead, anytime soon'."
This "live for the moment" approach to life persists "and now they are being asked to take responsibility for their own country and make it all work. And, of course, it hasn't been smooth and it won't be."
But the new East Timor has a chance to be a shining example of "due process" and democracy, "and not become like every other country in south-east Asia".
Dr Murphy (58), a native of Iowa whose great-grandfather was from Co Cork, is a workaholic legend of medical service to the people of East Timor. He is in Dublin as part of a busman's holiday which will take him to the US, Singapore and Australia because funding for his Bairo Pite clinic in the capital, Dili, has run out.
This is because East Timor is no longer seen as an emergency. He will be explaining his work to a meeting today at 6 p.m. at the Royal College of Surgeons,
The clinic needs a constant $3,000 a month and "we are behind on salaries". He is the only doctor there and has a staff of 31 Timorese.
He sees medical care "as a right and not a privilege for those with resources". He also hopes that this philosophy will be part of the ideals of the new East Timor "but the big players in the world may have different ideas". He refers here to the World Bank/IMF model of development.
He eschews the top-down "pre packaged" approach of the World Health Organisation and now the health ministry in Dili. He is inspired by the Brazilian model of Paulo Freire, author of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which relies on empowering and training mainly strong women in the villages. One of the drawbacks of the WHO model is that "nurses do not want to leave the capital". He says "it is not they who are going to take the pulse of the villages".
Far better to "sit under a tree with the women and listen to what they see as the problems - and pay them respect".
Dr Murphy worked for six years with the United Farmworkers Union in California and as a medical officer in Mozambique. He visited Dublin in 1999 when East Timor was "falling to pieces" following an orgy of punitive burning and murder for the Timorese decision to opt for independence from Indonesia.
Since then the Bairo Pite has treated 350,000 poor patients. That is 300 a day. The emphasis is now on preventable diseases like TB, malaria and diarrhoea.
The good thing about Timor is that it is so small. His vision is possible if the model can be got right early on, he says. The downside of that could be that Indonesia, with its troublesome regions of West Papua, Ambon, Aceh and Kalimantan, might see it as the threat of a good example.