Just an hour’s flight from Darwin, children are dying from diarrhoea.

By SOPHIE McNEILL

Just an hour’s flight from Darwin, children are dying from diarrhoea, suffering severe malnutrition and mum’s dying during childbirth. A call for assistance by doctors on the ground in East Timor coincides with the Federal Government’s decision to cut the country’s aid budget by 15 million dollars this financial year.

Four-year-old Ozmenia has huge brown eyes but everything else about her is tiny. She arrived in the malnutrition room at Dili’s Bairo Pite clinic weighing just 6.7 kilos. “She is malnourished because her family is very poor and they live in the mountains and don’t have access to water and good hygiene,” Lydia, the carer in charge of the ward tells me.

Unknown to many Australians, right on our doorstep in East Timor are some of the highest malnutrition rates outside of Africa. More than 45% of children under 5 here are underweight for their age – a rate double that of their neighbour Indonesia. “Certain times of the year there’s just not much to eat. Approximately half of the people are stunted which means they’re not as big as they should be for their age,” explains clinic medical director Dr Dan Murphy.

The former GP from America’s Midwest came to the country 16 years ago with just one little bag and has been here ever since. During that time he’s managed to do an awful lot with very few resources. “There is really no access to anything near adequate healthcare,” says Dr Murphy. “In every category in health, their numbers are worse than most of South East Asia. We don’t have very many meds. We don’t have very many diagnostic tools so mostly we’re going by smoke and mirrors. You can’t do as well as you could if you had all the right tests.”

According to the UN, two thirds of East Timorese live in poverty, a third in severe poverty. There is still billions of dollars worth of unexplored resources sitting in the Timor Sea but as Australia and East Timor continue to wrangle over who owns the greater sunrise oilfield– these extra billions remain in the seabed.  And the living standards here remain dire.

Up in the mountains of the Ermera District, women have walked for hours to see Dr Aida Goncalves and her team of midwives. Every second day a woman in East Timor dies in childbirth – one of the highest maternal death rates in Asia. Dr Goncalves does her best to convince women seek out help when giving birth. “They live so far away from the hospital. Imagine you have to walk. You have contractions. It’s about from here to the hospital is 4 to 5 kilometers. So a lot of women choose to have their babies at home because of that,” says Dr Goncalves.

Her motivations make a difference to these people’s lives is driven by tragedy close to home – three brothers lost to preventable illness. “Two of my brothers they died of diarrhoea,” says Dr Aida tells Foreign Correspondent. “Something in your country that doesn’t kill people, but here in East Timor it kills a lot of people.”

The cut comes in the wake of promise by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop that foreign aid in our region would be a priority saying in January that “We are focusing on alleviating poverty; we are focusing on economic growth and empowering women and girls, better educational outcomes and better health outcomes in our region.”

CEO of World Vision, Tim Costello says his organisation had planned to begin a new million dollar nutrition and child health program in East Timor in January next year. “We had a project that is right in the zone of nutrition. It was with expectant mothers and mothers of child birth age and children under 5 really attending to their nutrition.”

However, after the NGO had 7 million dollars cut from its government funding in the May budget this program had now had to be shelved for this year. “When we are cutting in a place like East Timor it’s a very bad message. After all Australia is still the second wealthiest country in the world on a per capita median basis,” says Mr Costello.

You can see Sophie McNeill’s full report on East Timor tonight on Foreign Correspondent at 8pm on ABC TV.

Sophie McNeill is reporter/producer with ABC TV’s Foreign Correspondent. She has reported from Afghanistan, Gaza, Pakistan, Syria, Israel and Iraq. Sophie is a mad Fremantle Dockers fan and mum to two young boys.  You can follow her on twitter @Sophiemcneill and Instagram here.

If you would like to help NGO’s doing a wonderful job on the ground in East Timor please donate to-

http://bairopiteclinic.org

www.hiamhealth.org

http://www.easttimorheartsfund.org.au

http://www.surgeons.org/for-the-public/racs-global-health/timor-leste/