Featured image L-R: Marino, Rofina, Ella, Michele Rankin, Sidonia, Mario and Anjelica Rankin
By Soraya Kassim, Palms Executive Director
My recent field trip to Timor Leste provided the perfect opportunity to take stock of Palms’ development model and impact. It was gratifying to see that, although we may be a small player in the international development ‘industry’, we can make a big difference. As we mark the end of in-country placement for our 2022 Solidarity Award winning Palms participant Michele Rankin, I take the opportunity to focus on the work she and her daughters Anjelica and Gabby did at the Balibo Community Centre in Timor Leste.
I did a long interview with Marino Fernandez, a long term volunteer with the Balibo Community Centre, who now leads a dedicated and skilled team of East Timorese at the Centre. Bright eyed and clear thinking, he was a pleasure to listen to, as he detailed for me the training and mentoring that the Rankins had gifted the community over the years.
After enumerating a long list of skills which the team had been mentored in he said,
“What really really make us happy, the team happy, there’s a lot of things that we have since the first Palms placement in 2013 until 2024. What we have or what skills we have, we will continue with some program or some activity or some project that’s left and it will be continuing in 2025…. in Balibo district because after the placement we have skills, the strength and we understand and we now get the result that’s already done and then we will continue with the confidence. Very confidence. Thank you.”
Marino Fernandez, Balibo Community Learning Centre Coordinator, Project Manager & International Liaison Officer
Importantly, he went on to say that the Centre would not be immediately applying for a new Palms participants, and may not ever apply for one again. Instead they would digest all that they had learnt, and apply it. I can think of no more ringing endorsement than Marino’s confidence that they were holding the keys themselves.
Although Marino’s comments were the most detailed and explicit of all my interlocutors, there were some strong themes which emerged in my discussions with other partners in Maliana, Bedois and Atabae which signpost three distinguishing characteristics of Palms which appear to have been the keys to our success.
The first was long term commitment. In the case of Michele and her daughters, their extended service to the Balibo community is extraordinary. In the other cases the long term commitment has been achieved through a series of placements where participants were able to pass the baton in such a way as to ensure that each built on the work of their predecessors. The importance of long term commitment is hardly surprising. Disadvantage is usually the product of literally hundreds of years of Colonialism, so we can hardly expect that the impact will be undone in a fly in-fly out short consultancy here and there. This is the particularly the case for projects involving community development, governance and changing entrenched habits and experiences in pedagogy.
The second was collaboration, including with donors and others of goodwill from Australia. The Balibo Community Trust has been an invaluable partner to the people of Balibo. The Palms contribution has been to anchor that assistance with on the ground support to ensure the efficacy of that assistance and extend its impact beyond what even the local people imagined would be possible. Similar contributions have been or are being made in Timor Leste by organisations such as Friends and Partners of East Timor and other ‘friendship’ groups around Australia, various Rotary and Lions Clubs, and religious orders based in Australia. There is much to be said for purposefully marshalling our collective resources to ensure that projects have critical mass and are well supported by volunteers embedded in community.
Finally, when I met representatives of larger volunteer organisations AVP and VSA, it was clear that Palms continues to fill a niche which would otherwise generally be neglected, when we focus our efforts in non-metropolitan areas with partners who are working with those who are often quite literally ‘on the margins’.
As I look to the year ahead and hope for the opportunity for further collaboration to continue this proud tradition, I am grateful for these lessons well learned.