The Little Girl Featured On This Site

In case you are wondering and to avoid speculation, the little girl shown on both this site and Travel Ethos is an East Timorese market seller, about 8 years old. Get ready for a soap box!

The reasons I chose to feature her on my company's travel sites (including this forum) which concentrate mostly on tourism to Bali / Lombok and Thailand are multiple. First, my own daughter, although a lot younger, looks very much like her and I thank God for the fact she, my daughter, will not need to be a market seller when she is eight years old. I get a bit peeved with foreign tourists who say they go to a particular destination because they love the people and want to help them, yet somehow think booking into a highly profitable hotel owned by less than savoury people who do nothing for the locals except pay appallingly low minimum wages while cheating them out of the service charges / tips they are legally entitled to is somehow truly helping those locals. It truly irks me when scenes like this little girl selling morning glory (yes, that is what she is selling) to help her family rather than being in school are somehow considered cute rather than sad by foreign visitors. Perhaps she is selling vegetables instead of getting an education that will help her in the future because her parents are hotel workers cheated by their employers. I hope one day tourists will live up to the realities of the world and understand their holiday dollars can not just make a difference but bring change; change for the much better, so little island girls can go to school and live full, free lives like the rest of us.

Second, although I love Bali, I hate Indonesia; I do not understand why a country that has murdered more people (including many thousands of Balinese in the late 1960's) than Burma / Myanmar in the last 40 years can somehow be a respected member of the International community, when clearly its human rights record says it is not. Oh, that's right; Burma doesn't have the natural mineral reserves of Indonesia, is not as strategically important, and is an ally of China, not the USA and its puppets in London and Canberra. The little girl's face to me shows hope; hope now the stench of Jakarta is finally abating, though not gone, tomorrow has more chance of being a better day. I wish that same hope for the Balinese and all the people of the Indonesian archipelago as is their moral and international legal right. Perhaps this little girl is selling vegetables in East Timor because one or both of her parents were murdered by Indonesian troups or so called "Wanra" militias, loyal to Jakarta, who killed thousands on her island paradise. I pray one day the evil politicians and military of Indonesia will be held to account for their acts against humanity.

Finally, the little girl looks Portuguese, and I live in Portugal with my Balinese wife and our two children. Although I am British, I have scant regard for Britain these days; moreover their foreign "policy". I am a big advocate of the European Union which, despite its bureaucratic faults, is bringing peace, prosperity and quality of living through civil and human rights to many people. I have minimal confidence in the United Nations being a political club, but I have a lot of faith in the economic union of the EU because all its resultant necessary protectionism gives anyone with an EU passport more rights than anyone anywhere else in the world. I hope the EU will one day enlarge to become the WU. I salute Portugal for amending their constitution to make all EU law part of their law. I hope one day this little girl will live in a prosperous and secure country like Portugal like my daughter. I wonder what this girl's life would have been like if the former WW2 Axis leaders of Java were never set up by the USA, Britain and Australia to take over the former colonies of Holland and Portugal. God bless Portugal and the EU.

I have never been to East Timor but hope to one day. The little girl was actually photographed by Luciana Ferrero (photographer and translator) who helped me with translations from English to that barnyard language called "Indonesian" while I was trying to communicate with the mafia police of Bali, which I now understand they do not want to do as their mandate has nothing to do with law enforcement.