"All the priests tell me," said the little Silesian nun at a polling booth, "that if the people show up and vote, independence wins." If the priests are right, then East Timor voted yesterday for freedom from Indonesia in the UN referendum giving it a choice between independence and autonomy.
At every polling station visited yesterday by a delegation of Irish Government observers led by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Andrews, the people had turned out in huge numbers to make full use of the first real opportunity to decide their own destiny in 400 years.
Nowhere was the enthusiasm more apparent than in the village of Hatukesi, 5,200 feet up in the wooded mountains west of the capital, Dili. Hatukesi has the biggest concentration of displaced people in East Timor. They are mostly illiterate subsistence farmers who fled their villages in recent months when attacked by pro-Indonesian militias.
From the coast it took an hour and a half grinding up a precipitous road lined with thatched huts (some burned to the ground) set amid clusters of poinsettia and sweet-scented bougainvillaea, to reach this stronghold of the FALANTIL resistance movement. The little convoy of EU observers almost didn't make it, and one car had to be abandoned where the road had collapsed, but eventually we arrived at the UN polling station just outside the village, where yellow butterflies fluttered round photographs of the jailed FALANTIL leader Xanana Gusmao, pinned up on palm trees.
Mr Andrews plunged into the crowd of voters, dispensing revolutionary handclasps and getting wide smiles from teeth stained red with betel juice as he towered above them. Sgt Nick Foster of the London Metropolitan Police, one of the civilian police assigned to the United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) told him he had arrived at 5.30 a.m. to open the polling station in the schoolhouse and found the narrow road already clogged with people clutching big white registration cards. "They had walked for hours over the hills. It was very moving," he said.
Despite a campaign of intimidation, 4,500 people had emerged from the bush around Hatukesi to vote in the referendum, and by midday yesterday over 3,300 had cast their ballots.
For the election monitor, Mr Juan Pablo Letelier, a Socialist MP from Chile and son of Orlando Letelier, the Chilean ambassador to the US who was assassinated in Washington in 1976 by the Pinochet regime, it was also an occasion of great emotion.
"We have a saying in Spanish, we turn the hand, that is, we give back what we receive," he said. "We received an awful lot of solidarity in Chile's struggle for democracy and I want to give some back, and I'm so grateful to have an opportunity to see this moment."
In Liquica on the coast, where militias massacred dozens of refugees in April, there was also a huge turnout of voters. In scenes reminiscent of the first free elections in South Africa, people old and young, some men in cowboy hats and women carrying babies stood patiently in long lines, holding umbrellas or polling cards as protection from the tropical sun.
Everything went smoothly, with people who believe in a better life under Indonesia queuing quietly with those who just want to see the departure of the grey-uniformed, gun-toting Indonesian soldiers who have brought such misery to this beautiful half-island. There was some tension because of the funeral outside town of a militiaman killed by pro-independence supporters at which a volley of 50 shots was fired.
Militia hard men prowled around town but generally stayed away from polling booths, though a feared local leader, Mr Sacarias Gonzales, arrived at a polling station on the outskirts with an escort of motorcycles to berate a Spanish police officer, Sgt Francis Navares, over rumours that an Australian TV crew had been encouraging people to vote for independence.
Incredibly, at 2.10 p.m., with nearly two hours left for polling, only a black she-goat occupied the precincts of the polling booth at Maubara further along the coast. By then all but 10 of the 3,513 registered voters had cast their ballots. "Our only problem was congestion," said police officer Paul Symonds of New Zealand.
"The promise of secrecy had been a great incentive to people supporting independence - that and an incredible will to vote, despite intimidation," said an Australian monitor at another polling station. Here a gnarled, white-haired old man in bare feet replied "autonomy" when asked by a television reporter how he had voted. Away from the camera, he said: "I'm afraid I can't tell the truth, they're going to kill us all."
Mr Andrews found the day's experience "very humbling". He said the international community, including Ireland, must help with a programme of reconstruction if East Timor now gets its independence. "Ireland can help with people, with administrative know-how and economic development aid."
Returning along the almost deserted coast road to Dili, the Irish convoy ran into a nasty incident which tempered the euphoria of the poll observers. Near the airport, a small crowd of pro-Indonesian youths had surrounded two men on a motorcycle. One was beating the young pillion passenger who was wearing a green FALANTIL beret and was trying to stem the blood flowing from a wound to his mouth.
As the Land-Rover of the Minister for Foreign Affairs drove by, militiamen with automatic weapons were running towards the scene. We didn't see how it ended, but the event underlined the foreboding of an old woman at Hatukesi polling station who had lost a son in fighting.
"Was there trouble today?" a visitor had asked her in the East Timor language, Tetun. "Not today," she replied. "Was there trouble yesterday?" "Yes," she said. "And will there be trouble tomorrow?" "Yes," she replied, in a matter-of-fact voice. But nothing would have stopped her casting the first vote in her life as a step to a better future.