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My name's Helen Hill I'm a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology.
I teach mainly in Sociology to students in international community development. The award
I got was for my 20 years of work in East Timor. I went there on my study leave in 2000
and started establishing linkages between Victoria University and the National University
of Timor Lorosae (UNTL) but also with other bodies and institutions.
When I came to Victoria University, I was coming from Fiji where I'd been teaching at
the Commonwealth Youth Program and as a result of that, I established at VU a course called
Asia Pacific Community Development at that time and a lot of the principles are classic
community development principles, so in a sense it was a very good teaching model to
use with the students we had at that time from the Pacific and later Australian students
and later Timorese students doing the international community development course.
When Timor became opened up, I realised that we have a lot of opportunities here at VU
and there were many other Timorese who would benefit from links with VU spending short
periods of time here or even enrolling in a degree, so it was really being inspired
by the Timorese themselves to try and create some opportunities.
I've always been interested in equality and bringing about justice, social justice, human
rights. The Timor struggle was for many years a human rights struggle. Once independence
came it was very much switched rapidly to a development scenario and a lot of aid which
goes into Timor is sad to say inappropriate. So I was quite keen to try to bring some of
my expertise from the Pacific to Timor.