Leaving on a jet plane.... again
Departing from Cape Town, this time directly en route to Singapore, then on to Denpasar, Bali and finally on to Dili in East Timor - or more properly, Timor Leste.
This time I am going for longer than before - 4 weeks instead of 2. Hopefully that means that the work will not be as pressured and as stressful as the last time and that I will be able to set my own pace, including a bit more leisure time.
It's a grey, miserable typical winter's day in Cape Town, but here high above the clouds a mere half hour out of Cape Town the sun is shining brightly as we hug the eastern coastline of the country, the warm Indian ocean beckoning. Most of this flight will be over that vast expanse of water...
My assignment this time is to take further the research work I did with the martial arts groups in Timor Leste. In Dili, the capital there are easily 15 different groups practicing; in the country as a whole there are between 20,000 and 90,000 people practicing some or other form of martial art. But that statement also has to be qualified.. The number is probably somewhere in the middle of those two estimates. Also the martial arts groups include well-known martial arts such as karate, taekwondo, kung fu, my own aikido and shorinji-kempo. There are some Indonesian pentak silat styles. And then there are some undefinable Timorese martial arts styles - some of which are more correctly called ritual arts because they practice not fighting style but choose rather to rely on invoking some higher power for protection (through an amulet or a bandana). However they are inspired some of these groups have been involved in inter-group violence that is multi-layered and complex and represent the machinations of the Timorese society as it tries to find its feet as the worlds newest nation state after years of external oppression and domination.
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