Before Reaching a Conclusion: What Timor-Leste Taught Me About Listening

06 Oct 2026

7 Min Read

Muhammad Mahathir (Contributing Writer), The Taylor's Team (Editor)

IN THIS ARTICLE

During a visit to a coffee plantation in Timor-Leste, I found myself walking just ahead of a conversation I badly wanted to join. My comparative politics lecturer was speaking with James A. Robinson, an economist and political scientist who shared the 2024 Economic Sciences Prize for research on how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.

I slowed my pace, listening from just close enough to follow. Several times, I wanted to say something, but hesitated. Then it occurred to me that I was no longer a child eavesdropping on the adults. I was a student, and I had a perspective I could contribute.

That small decision became one of the clearest moments of my visit. I had travelled to Timor-Leste looking for an experience rather than a predetermined answer. By the time I left, I had not found one neat conclusion about the country. I had found a more careful way of forming conclusions.

Choosing to Join the Conversation

Members of the Taylor's delegation walking through a coffee plantation in Timor-Leste

I stepped closer and joined the discussion. I described a comparison I had been thinking about in Malaysia: the attraction of stable government work, the need to build technical capacity and the role education policy might play. I wondered aloud whether a similar concern could help me understand President José Ramos-Horta's emphasis on science and technology. I was not suggesting that the two countries were the same. I was trying to understand why those priorities might matter in different contexts.

What stayed with me was how seriously Robinson listened. I had expected the distance between a student and a scholar of his standing to feel enormous. In that moment, it did not. My contribution did not have to settle the debate to belong in it.

In my Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) tutorials, I had grown accustomed to a room where disagreement could be useful. Ideas were meant to be questioned rather than protected. At the plantation, that habit moved beyond the classroom. A theory I had encountered on the page was being tested against politics, history and experience, and I was no longer only reading the exchange. I was participating in it.

The moment also challenged my idea of expertise. Being heard did not mean my view was automatically right. It showed me that even an expert conversation could leave room for a student's question. Expertise was not a reason to stop asking questions. It was a reason to ask better-informed questions and pay closer attention to the evidence offered in reply.

Arriving Without a Ready-Made Answer

Before the trip, I deliberately avoided imagining too much about a country I had read about but never experienced first-hand. I did not want a collection of expectations to replace observation. If I am honest, my first reason for joining was simply adventure. I suppose I went to find a reason for going.

The journey came at a time when university life still felt new to me: new classmates, new ideas and a course built around questions that rarely sit inside one discipline. I brought that curiosity with me, but an open mind did not mean an empty one. I still arrived in Dili with habits, preferences and assumptions shaped by my own education and experience in Malaysia.

The trip gave those assumptions something concrete to meet. Instead of trying to remember every item on the itinerary, I found myself returning to a few conversations—moments when I spoke, listened, reacted and then reconsidered.

Taylor's students holding hands with local schoolchildren in a circle game in a courtyard in Timor-Leste

Seeing Diplomacy From Inside the Room

During an early visit to the Malaysian Embassy in Dili, our group was asked what we valued about studying PPE at Taylor's. When my turn came, I spoke about the openness I experienced in class: lecturers and students could disagree, test an argument and continue the conversation without treating disagreement as a problem in itself.

Saying this in an embassy made the idea feel different. Diplomacy had often seemed distant to me, something conducted through formal statements and meetings between governments. Inside that room, I began to see how it also depends on accumulated relationships, patient exchanges and the willingness to understand how another person sees an issue.

Timor-Leste became ASEAN's eleventh member in October 2025 through a collective decision by ASEAN leaders. The embassy conversation made me think less about the announcement as a single event and more about the work that precedes moments like it. I could not see all that work in one meeting, but I left more alert to relationships that are easy to overlook when we read only the outcome.

It also gave me a practical reason to think about how I carried myself during the visit. I was there as a student, not a diplomat, but listening carefully and representing my own perspective responsibly still mattered.

Members of the Taylor's delegation being greeted in a hall at the Nicolau Lobato Presidential Palace in Dili

When One Perspective Was Not Enough

On 26 August, the Taylor's delegation met President José Ramos-Horta at Nicolau Lobato Presidential Palace. According to the Presidency's account, he spoke about science and technology, entrepreneurship, civic responsibility, education and environmental care.

As a social-science student, I initially felt defensive when I heard such a strong emphasis on science and technology. I quickly asked where my own field fitted in. That reaction followed me during the drive down from the coffee plantation, when the open windows gave me room to think.

I also kept thinking about a conversation with Cornelio Cardoso Bere from the President’s administration, one of the people who supported us during the trip. He spoke about how poverty could narrow the choices available to young people, but his words were not only about what was difficult. He also spoke with hope about the next generation.

That conversation did not answer the larger question for me. It did, however, make me reconsider how quickly I had responded. I had reacted from the position I knew best: that of a student who valued the social sciences and did not want them dismissed. I had not spent enough time asking what immediate priorities might look like to someone living and working in a different context.

I found myself returning to the is-ought distinction: the difference between describing the world as it is and deciding how it ought to be. The distinction did not tell me which field should receive greater emphasis, and it did not require me to abandon the value I placed on social science. It reminded me to understand the conditions behind a position before judging it from my own.

That was uncomfortable in a useful way. I began to understand context as more than a paragraph of background at the start of a case study. History matters, but so do the political and cultural conditions in which a decision is being made. In future PPE work, I want to make those layers part of the analysis rather than reach for a familiar comparison too quickly.

Leaving With Better Questions

On our final evening, we gathered at our hotel's rooftop restaurant in Dili and talked about what we would remember. I kept returning to the conversations rather than the formal schedule: speaking in the embassy, deciding to join the plantation discussion and sitting with my own reaction after the presidential meeting.

A brief visit could not make me an authority on Timor-Leste. If anything, it showed me how easily a visitor can mistake a first impression for an explanation. The trip made classroom frameworks more concrete, but also less comfortable. They gave me ways to organise questions, not permission to diagnose a country after a few days.

One question remains with me. President Ramos-Horta's remarks included environmental care alongside education, technology and civic responsibility. I am interested in how Timor-Leste may pursue development while protecting the natural environment that was so present throughout our journey. I do not yet know what that balance will look like. What changed is how I will approach the question: with more attention to context, more care about the limits of comparison and more willingness to listen before reaching a conclusion.

If you are drawn to questions that rarely have one simple answer, Taylor's Bachelor in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (Honours) offers a way to examine them across disciplines and consider how ideas operate in context.

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Muhammad Mahathir is a student in Taylor's University's Bachelor in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (Honours) programme. He joined the Taylor's student delegation to Timor-Leste in August 2026.

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