“The First to Weave, the First to Welcome: Tia Rosa’s Trailblazing Journey in Com”

A week before the celebration of International Women’s Day, I spent my Saturday morning chatting with one of the most business-minded and hard-working women in the village of Com, tia Rosa Moreirra Ratu (Tia means aunt in Tetum). I was part of TimorGetaway team who were deployed in Com for the one-week training on business plan, food safety, barista, handcrafts, ecotourism and marine conservation. The team had already informed me in advance about the enthusiasm and curiosity of local community during the first 4 days of the training. Tia Rosa was one of them. She took a break from her tais-weaving activity and delegated a family member to look after her accommodation, Rosa Guesthouse, to participate in the training. So I was really looking forward to our interview that morning to learn more about tia Rosa’s story. 

“Good morning, tia Rosa,” I greeted her with a smile as we met in front of her souvenir shop, a 3 by 4 rectangular room with a large window located at the porch of the main house where she runs the guesthouse. The house is located right on Com’s main road where community lives and other three guesthouses operate.

She then walked towards an old bed frame inside the shop where her backstrap loom, a primary weaving kit for manual tais production, was set up and pointed to a seat across from her to me.

“I am still working on this tais. I was away for the training, so I didn’t have the chance to finish this project. I hope it’s okay with you that I continue weaving as we are talking,” said tia Rosa.

I agreed to do the interview in the most convenient way for her. There were so many questions that run through my head but since we were under time pressure, I decided to ask only the relevant ones.

“Can you tell me more about your family and what you were doing prior to running the Rosa Guesthouse?” I asked.

“I was just housewife who had neither business nor handcraft skill. I lost my husband in the 80s to the war shortly after we got married. I had two children with him, a son and daughter, but I lost my son. So, I only have my daughter now and my 4 grandchildren from her,” she responded.

She then added, “I found myself in a situation where I had to be the provider for my household. We were also instructed by the Indonesian government to make tais. I did not have any skill at all, so I had to learn tais weaving from scratch by observing my aunt who was a professional weaver. I slowly picked up her skill.  After independence, I continued the weaving activity and established one of the first tais weaving group in Com, Beira Mar, in 2008. I also had the opportunity to learn more techniques from friends and was selected to represent Timor-Leste during a cultural event in Macau back in 2009.”

Upon her return from Macau, tia Rosa used the grants she received to establish more weaving groups in Com. She admitted that she wanted to provide opportunities for other women in Com to explore the creativity. On the other hand, she was also aware about the lack of interest from young girls to learn weaving.

The price of tais in her shop ranges from USD 20 for small ones called selendang to USD 200 for the big, more sentinmental ones with more rare type of threads. The price reflects costs of inputs such as colorful threads and intensive labor hours.

“The small tais takes about 3 days to finish while the big ones about a week,” she explained.

She added that many tais weaver group used to travel to Dili in the early 2000s to sell tais because there were more customers in Dili. They took public bus and stayed at family’s house.

“We would carry our tais around and walk under the hot sun to find customers in hotels and restaurants, chantting ‘buy buy selendang, buy buy tais’ everytime we saw a foreigner. We were able to do all the hardwork when we were a bit younger and still physically strong. We sold so many products at that time. The market was good,” she continued.

In 2002, Tia Rosa also started the accommodation business. Her guesthouse is the first one to be estabished in Com and has inspired neighbors to take similar path.

“There was no guethouse in Com during those years. It all started unexpectedly on the day when a tourist couple who visited Com knocked on my door while looking for food and accommodation. I did not speak any English but luckily the lady knew the Indonesian word for accommodation, losmen, and instally understood their needs. I quickly prepared the logistics for the room, bringing in mattress and clean bed sheets from the neighbors. There were no extra pillows for guests. We didn’t have rice, so guests also ate the local staple food, ground corn, during their two-day stay here. They were completely fine with that.”

There was no platform to promote her business to clients in Dili and abroad. Tia Rosa completely depended on word of mouth from guests to do the marketting.

“I was surprised to receive the second guest at my place. The portuguese lady who stayed for two weeks offered me help with the marketting. She wrote in Portuguese ‘Aqui aluga o quarto cada noite $5’ on a board and put it infront of the house,” said tia Rosa with a big smile as she recalled the moment.

Back then, guests shared the same house where she lived. The house had only 3 bedrooms, so she decided to let guests use 2 rooms and leave the other one for her and her daughter.  

“Luckily, now we have a total of 7 rooms in the front side of the house for guests. Back in the day, the only two bedrooms used for guests were all inside the house. It was a bit awkward to come in contact with them everyday since we all used the same hall and door to get in and out. As I started to earn more money from my businesses, I decided to renovate the house and build guest rooms separated from the main house. This gives us more privacy.”

The ebb and flow of tourism in Com has direct impacts on the incomes of local business owners such as Tia Rosa. The low number of visitors in Com in the past 13 years is mainly due to the departure of international staff after the completion of UN mission in the country and partly due to the increasing price of flights to Timor-Leste.

“When we used to have a lot of visitors, we were able to sell many products. Also, our rooms were fully booked for a week or two. We could easily earn USD 300 in a week. Now it’s not the same anymore. I don’t have guests here as often as at the other guesthouses. The shops also don’t have many customers. We were lucky to have customers occasionally, either foreigners or local Timorese,” she lamented.

There are some initiatives to revamp Com’s tourism. Recently both Government and development partners have allocated budgets to support community tourism in municipalities. A Turtle Conservation Group in Com received grants to establish their conservation center, café, and rental services for outdoor activities such as snorkeling, fishing, and paddle boarding. TimorGetaway, funded by Japanese Government through UNDP Indonesia’s ASEAN Blue Innovation Challenge, is trying to establish an online platform to empower local communities and promote Com’s ecotourism potential. Business owner such as Tia Rosa hopes that this initiative can bring more tourists to her village.

“I hope that with all these supports we have now, more tourists can come visit us again like what we see in Ataúro Island,” said Tia Rosa as we concluded our interview.

The interview with Tia Rosa is another reminder of how important it is to support initiatives for rural development through the tourism sector. Communities can take advantage of various financial and non-financial benefits from hospitality industry and ecotourism activities in their village.  Tia Rosa’s story of perseverance and resilience encourages me and my TimorGetaway team to explore different means to empower community-based initiatives and link them to potential partners from both public and private sectors.