Do you remember those stories you hear as a kid, or maybe you still hear them now, about the bank robbery in the small western town? The bandits rob the bank, making off with all the gold and cash. The fearless lone sheriff hunts down the outlaws and all ends happy. Up until today, I had never thought about what happens when there is no cash left in town, especially in the days before electronic purchases.
The state of Oecussi is isolated from the rest of Timor-Leste, as it is surrounded on three sides by Indonesia. The fourth side is the ocean. There is only one bank in the entire state to serve its population of 70,000 or so. Cash is the only way to make purchases. If you don’t have any Washingtons, they use the American Dollar as the currency here, you won’t get anything. Of course some businesses will allow a credit line to regular customers, for example, we don’t pay the gravel breakers for each truck we carry, we pay them weekly, but they are few and far between.
The project I’m working is funded by USAID money. The USAID program wants the community to contribute their labor since they aren’t paying for the material costs of the system. Thus, the community to build the water system. But since it is difficult to get a community to work for nothing, the project supplies the community with food when they are working. Here, that means rice, lots of rice. Today, I ran out of rice. I called the warehouse wondering where the rest of my rice was. There was no rice. Why? There is no money to buy rice with because the project couldn’t withdraw cash from the bank since it was all stolen. Now, I’m facing a halt in most work, because we can’t get the communities to work if we have no rice. So goes my hope that September would go smoother than July and August went. Now, did this happen in the old West after the bank was robbed?
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