Remembering Villa.

Villa. A name that conjures images of serenity - an italian countryside, vineyards and cottages covered in creepers, bathing in the temperate summer sun. Women in thick frocks and aprons, bare-footed and laughing, crushing grapes underfoot.

Villa is the name a small village - big for Atauro standards notwithstanding - at the south eastern bend of Atauro island, Timor Leste. Hardly the idyllic European respite, but breath-taking in its own way. The place is hot and dry for nine months of the year, and only has electricity running through its cables from six in the evening to midnight.

Villa has a community hall situated just less than a hundred meters from the beach. That was where thirteen of us - a motley crew comprising people from all walks of life - slept, ate, laughed, fell ill, recovered and played for 13 days from 13 to 25 November 2004.

We were there as a marine expedition team, to conduct benthic surveys of their coral reefs, and take down scientific data on the health of the corals, fish and inverterbrate life there.

Save our expedition leader and scientific officer, 11 of us were just ordinary divers with a passion for the underwater world, but went through entry-level training on how to tell one fish from another, and identify the growth forms of different types of corals. Sufficient enough to allow us take down scientific data which our Scientific Officer would compile. With the data, she would make an assessment of the reefs of Atauro. Further down the road, when two more assessments are conducted, a report will be crafted and filed with our local NGO - Timor Aid, for future management policies of the island.

In particular, Timor Aid has its eye on developing a marine park for eco-tourism, the first form of which is already developing a repute of its own in Tua Koin, a village 5km north of Villa. Eventually, in the world's newest nation, a budgeoning eco-tourism industry will develop. The children will have more options when they step out other than fishing, agriculture and making baskets, wooden goggles and woodcraft. Let's just cross our fingers that the womenfolk will not develop the other side - the ugly one - of the tourist trade.

Our job is now done, and most of us are back in the swing of urban life in Singapore - Mei returning to her architect job, Bee to her Sports Consultation position, me to my civil service one.

I write this now so that I do not forget.

With the ochre of this virtual ink, and the pictures I post, I hope the memory will linger longer for me. And for the passer-by to catch a glimpse of that world which will be very quickly transformed with the onset of tourism.

SIX months in Virtual Comatose

Six months. That's how long the online silence has lasted. The brainjuice persona lives, yes, but she's in a comatose state right now, and I'm trying hard to resuscitate her. Trying.

Wasn't till now, when the year starts winding down and people around me start valuing friends over work a bit more that I, too, am forcing myself to sit down and write.

In the meantime, what's happened?
- Lee Hsien Loong becomes Prime Minister of Singapore.
- Read and hear about the review of Chinese Language teaching over and over and over again
- Get myself married
- Get a haircut
- Have ourselves a wonderful honeymoon in Bali, while George Bush gets re-elected much to everyone's surprise, and many a consternation
- Watch Yasser Arafat die, and then not, and then die again on TV.
- Write a good 16 speeches for the political heads.
- Learn how to call another set of parents "Mom" and "Dad".
- Spend three weeks in Timor Leste, sleeping on the floor, diving, eating, reading, thinking, watching innocence and poverty
- Experience my first tremor after earthquake strikes Alor, just 100km east of Atauro island
- Wake up to a beautiful sunrise at 5.30 every morning and have dolphins swim next to us.
- Learn not to miss my pill (still learning)
- Almost get swept away by the current
- Pray for a friend seriously injured in a car crash
- Hear about the Tidal Wave post-West Sumatra quake that measured 8.9 on the Richter Scale

So six month's later, my identity undergoes a change, at least in nomenclature, and I'm a Mrs instead of a Miss.
And we're busy planning and saving for the home. Cursing and swearing as the developers take their time to complete rectification works because we can't start furnishing it and moving in proper until they do. I'm still getting used to the idea that I no longer attend the same church, see my parents every night. And the idea that I will need extra effort and good reasons to go home just to see my parents age.

I wonder what the new year will bring with it too.

We're both attending a Financial Planning course now. W realised that we had better start saving and investing and building a nice little nest egg for ourselves NOW, if we don't want to die poor and hungry, because somebody did a study and said that our generation cannot expect our kids to feed us. We're also planning for Hubby to go off to do an MBA in 2006, and pondering over whether I should stay and work and pay for the home or go with him.

Yup... life as a married woman is a sure change from being just by myself. To be perfectly honest, it's all a little daunting too.

Most of all, it's realising that as the year comes and goes and another year draws near and knowing that it too will be over. It's the way TIME just inexorably goes on and on, as Sylvia Plath metaphorised, like a runaway train unable to control its momentum nor put a brake on itself.... and dragging us all - its passengers - into oblivion. That's what frightens me most.

It's strangely ironic that in the week after we begin the course on Financial Planning, a friend would linger close at death's door, a mere 34 year-old, her life hanging in the balance after a horrific crash that we only heard about in the papers because someone famous died in it.

I will always remember her saying that whenever someone asks her why she's never sad, always gregarious, always full of life - her answer would be "Because Life's too short".

Which begs the question - why save? why plan? why go through the painful process of stingeing on our PRESENT just so we can have a secure FUTURE? When we don't know when we'll pop off the surface of the earth?

Strange that I should entertain such questions at the cusp of my new life as a MRS too. But I guess where I am, at my vantage point, where with a sweep of my eyes I so easily behold the greatest of joys and sweetest of experiences, is also the place where there is so much to lose, and consequently so much to fear for.