During a very important day, one of those days that are considered to be written down on your agenda or in a cronology because something special will happen, one of those days that people tell you 2 weeks in advance that you shouldn't go out... I woke up in the morning and while driving in front of the government palace for the first time I paid more attention than usual on all those trucks parked there with all their green brown dressed people around them, or lazily sitting near the sea... wondering what was happening, what was the real reason why they were there... all around town people were taking the longest ways to avoid the city centre, while other people, specific ones, wrapped in party flags were going to the centre instead because they were to be the protagonists of this day. And during our normal trip in the old white big car we talked about democracy... not those general conversations on the general sense of democracy, but what is the practical value and meaning of it here and now... here when the country is having its first theoretically completely independent elections... theoretically... what would it be if they were really independent? when will they be really independent? could they be really? and then what is real independence? but the debate today was rather what is a real democracy? what is real democracy in a young country? is it just having election with 14 parties? or is it not burning down the houses of the people who will win and you don't like? is democracy something that grows slowly? or is it a threshold that either you reach or you don't? do you have to be alone and independent once you are democratic? and do you really need to be democratic?An old man that now works as a driver but speaks perfect portuguese, better than most of the people in this country (and I leave this debate on the language choice of this independent island to another time), was saying that at the end of the day there is few people in this country that are educated enough to be able to govern properly, and that there is a lot of people that are not educated enough to understand this.... so that, at the end of the day, probably a dictatorship, a good one, would be much better to explain people what is democracy and finally give it to them... and this is what a lot of the old people in this country, those who have fought Indonesia and who have experienced colonialism think, especially when they look at their youth... Is democracy really the best step a country can take? I don't know the answer obviously, but in such a special day where this island could potentially go through a mess, or this is what everybody is fearing... I really liked the idea of looking at these pictures I took in another island, a tiny little one just in front of us, a tiny little place that we see everyday while driving near the sea, the same little sland that hose guys in green and brown mymetic shirts were looking at this morning... and probably thought what the word calm and not democracy means.
