We're working on it but in the mean time..

A lot of my friends have asked why I went over to East Timor recently.

Well, this is why...

Our Associated Press health writer decided to do a story on how the World Health Organization (WHO) is eliminating diseases from its list, and East Timor (actually West Timor) which is an old leprosy colony.. so we decided to follow them out to an enclave off West Timor where they were doing a census and monitoring the remaining leprosy patients in Oe-cusse. So we were there to document that process, later on producing a story with photos and TV was filming it as well. A multimedia slide show will be put together so there's a lot of work to be done.

The story is currently being worked on so I haven't really edited my photos but I can share some happy snaps and some pictures which shows the beautiful land mass and mountains we saw.

The place we were at, Oecusse, is amazing. It's still untouched. We crossed rivers and went up steep mountains to reach some of the districts. I think we went to one of the most remote areas in Timor.

Needless to say the light was awesome, the people were great with the camera and the story is inspiring.

We got fitter climbing mountains to visit leprosy patients who were suffering from the disease since Japan's occupation and met a man who's toes were eaten up by rats because he couldn't feel from his ankle down when they attacked his toes which were covered in coconut oil to soften his chapped skin.

The whole trip was an adventure for us as well where we were nearly turned down from catching our flight, corrupted Indonesian Officials, not having electricity and a place to stay as well as getting bumbed off our United Nations helicopter - our only way out of Oecusse for the next 3 days which ended us chartering an MAF flight out which also turned us down in the airfield because it had to medivac some ill people and landed us on what was like the modern version of Noah's ark for 15hrs to get back to Dili.

So tiring but so fun.

Life. Can't get enough of it!

Will update soon.