Marines in East Timor work
to make residents' lives betterBy Jan Wesner Childs
Okinawa bureau
Everywhere U.S. Marines go in East Timor, children follow.
They wave and smile as Marines drive through rural villages on their way to work. They wait for handouts of food or water outside the compounds where the Marines live.
They die of disease as the Marines look on, able to do only so much to help.
A platoon from 9th Engineer Support Battalion, on a 90-day deployment from Okinawa to East Timor, is witnessing the birth of a new country and the struggles that come with it.
Some of the Marines described their experiences in a recent series of e-mails from Manatuto, about 45 miles outside the East Timor capital of Dili, where they are helping rebuild a school.
"The best thing and worst thing I’ve experienced is all the kids," wrote Sgt. Melissa Kay Manning, a squad leader. "We love to see them, and they are always excited to see us, but at the same time you feel bad because they are so poor, some of them don’t have parents anymore, and you wish you could take them all home with you.
"We put a roof on a tuberculosis clinic and while we were there working, one of the patients died. He was only 15 years old. He had died a little after midnight and had to be picked up the next morning, not by ambulance, he was put in the back of a pickup truck so he could be taken to his family way up in the mountains."
The clinic was one of about a half-dozen major projects the Marines are undertaking during their trip to East Timor, which started Sept. 18.
They replaced a bridge on Atauro, an isolated island about 20 miles from Dili with 8,000 inhabitants.
"Life on Atauro is primitive," wrote Capt. Dan Miller, commanding officer of Co. A, 9th ESB. "There is only one civilian vehicle and one ambulance on the island. Electricity is powered by two generators that provide electricity for eight hours a day to residents of the east side of the island."
Miller’s contingent in East Timor includes 14 Marine engineers, two military policemen for security and a Navy corpsman to provide medical care. Their deployment is dubbed Operation Create Opportunity.
The group will return to Okinawa just before Christmas.
Besides the clinic, school and bridge, the Marines are repairing two orphanages.
The Marines are the latest in a series of U.S. deployments to East Timor since the former Indonesian territory voted for independence last year. Members of all branches of the armed forces, from nearly every base in Japan, Okinawa and Guam, have been part of the effort.
Navy ships visit nearly every month to carry out humanitarian missions. The most recent was the USS O’Brien, based at Yokosuka Naval Base, near Tokyo. The ship is scheduled to pull into Dili again next week, and will be followed by the USNS Niagara Falls.
Marines deployed from Okinawa sent their e-mail messages from a computer in the Philippine military compound, where they are staying while they work on the school in Manatuto.
"There are Marines working hard in 90-degree heat on a Sunday afternoon to get the job done," wrote 2nd Lt. John Grimm, platoon commander. "The school is usually very busy, but there is no one around today. Most of the people have gone to church just up the road."
Grimm said water buffaloes regularly wander onto the construction site.
"The elementary school is comprised of eight buildings, of which only three have roofs on them," Staff Sgt. Cristobal Pereda wrote. "It has a center courtyard with animal waste everywhere. It is surrounded by a few houses that are being lived in and lots of houses with no roofs."
Pereda said the Marines live in an old courthouse where part of the U.N. Philippine Battalion (assigned to the U.N. peacekeeping force) also resides.
Behind the compound, "there is an uninhabited hut, and the kids that reside in the area are always looking over the fence to see what we are doing."
"It is almost like being in a parade down the street everyday, people waving as we drive by, with some kids running along the sidewalk to get that one more second waving at us."
Children watch the Marines’ every move.
"During chow at the sites, it is sometimes hard to sit there and eat MREs while kids, who have little to eat, watch us," Pereda wrote. "We are unable to offer them anything because, within seconds, we would be surrounded by locals wanting food and we would be unable to complete our mission.
"The hardest thing related to our job is knowing that though we are helping them, we are barely making an impact on this country."
The challenges are great. The engineer platoon, for example, has a hard time finding wood strong enough to use for roofs. And many of the buildings were destroyed by pro-Indonesia militias that raided East Timor after the independence vote.
The building where the Marines are staying in Manatuto is primitive, but they describe it as being better than what most East Timorese have.
"I am sitting on a cot, leaning on a wall," wrote Lance Cpl. Sean West. "We’ll start with the pale-white, close-to-smokey-colored, ceiling. There’s six wires hanging from the ceiling, only one with a light bulb. The room itself has 15 cots in it, each one covered with a mosquito net. There are windows but no glass, so we installed netting to keep the insects out.
"Outside is our dining tent. The dining table is on a gravel pit. We eat all of our meals in it to keep the ants out of our living quarters."
West, 19, has been in the Marines for a year and four months. He is far from his home in Olathe, Kansas.
"My first thought when I arrived at the Dili Airport was, ‘Here we go. Let’s get ready to help these people,’ " he wrote. "I couldn’t believe what I saw. Buildings in rubble. Children in the streets yelling, ‘Americano, America good!’ I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, about 100 children swimming in the sea. Shacks made from burnt wood, corrugated metal, tarps, whatever they could find."
West said he was "in shock. It was a devastating site."
Manning said she didn’t know what to expect when they first arrived in Dili.
"At the airport, we were told by someone that had been there for awhile that it would look pretty bad at first, but by the time we left we would notice a big difference," she wrote.
Things are changing fast in Dili. Those who have deployed there describe seeing charred buildings turned into homes, restaurant and shops almost overnight, and a strong will to survive by the people there.
"I think the people here are just like the friends I have back home, friendly, caring and just great people," West wrote. "This is by far the greatest time I have had in the Marine Corps. We are doing what I signed up for. We are helping rebuild East Timor."
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
