The steep track to the mountain hamlet of Kutet resembles a riverbed with stones, slippery mud, deep tracks and big holes. For more than an hour the white four-wheel-drive grinds up the hill, rocking and wallowing, before reaching the isolated place which is home to Richard Daschbach. Five little boys are joining the defrocked priest when he walks to the tiny wooden stairs, that leads to his house made of a concrete fundament, bamboo walls and a roof of corrugated iron.

Daschbach (now 82 years old) agrees to talk to Tempo Timor. Just before the interview starts he takes a piece of betel nut. While he chews the stimulant drug, which gives a sense of alertness and well-being, red residue fills his mouth. Daschbach - wearing long bleu trousers, a brown-grey-white polo-shirt and grey plastic Crocs - sits in a blue plastic chair in his one-room house which has books, little stuff, a stove, plastic cupboards and a big bed covered with a mosquito net. From behind his spectacles his blue eyes look straight at the interviewer.

Daschbach, who was born in the USA, came to West-Timor in 1966 as a parochial priest and settled in the mountains near Kefamenanu. After the Portuguese colonisers left Timor-Leste, he went to Oecusse. But it wouldn’t be until 1990 before he permanently settled in Kutet. ‘There is a special power that draws you to it,’ he says, adding: ‘There is a special appeal. The mountains. The people.’ He had permission from his congregation Societas Verbi Divini (SVD, Society of the Divine Word) to create a retreat-house. But things would turn out differently. As always there were many children around and Daschbach decided to set up Topu Honis shelter home. ‘It started organically, as children just came,’ he tells Tempo Timor.

Topu Honis has two locations. Young children stay in Kutet, while the teenagers are in the coastal village of Mahata. According to the organisation’s website, Topu Honis is ‘a safe haven’ for orphans, poor children, disabled adults and women fleeing abuse. It provides health care, food, schooling, ‘shelter and safety’, sponsorships for education and employment opportunities. Over the years ‘hundreds and hundreds’ of children stayed in Topu Honis, Daschbach explains. He can’t give exact numbers as the shelter did not keep statistics. The organisation received substantial amounts of money from – foreign - donors. (In February 2018, for instance, the shelter received more than 100.000 US dollars.)

During the UN sponsored referendum in 1999, when the Timorese overwhelmingly voted for independence from Indonesia which had brutally occupied the country for 24 years, Topu Honis protected many refugees who were fleeing brutal attacks by militia and Indonesian military. Until they all had to leave the shelter fleeing further into the mountains to save their lives. Topu Honis was burned down. Daschbach was praised for his efforts to save refugees. The shelter was rebuilt some 200 meters further up the hill. Timor-Leste’s Taur Matan Ruak, who was Falintil commander leader, army chief, president and is now prime minister, came ‘several times’ to pay his respect to the priest. Daschbach remembers that two boys who had lived in Kutet became Matan Ruak’s bodyguards.

But then in February 2018 the SVD received allegations that Daschbach had sexually abused young children living in Kutet. The congregation’s head in Rome ordered Fr. Yohanes Suban Gapun, SVD’s regional superior in Timor-Leste, to go to Oecusse and take Daschbach to Dili. While the congregation investigated the case, the priest was suspended and forbidden to perform priestly celebrations. However, during the interview with Tempo Timor, Daschbach holds on to another version, insisting that he was in SVD’s regional headquarters in Dili because he hadn’t had a proper break for decades. ‘I stayed there for six months as a vacation,’ he says.

When asked about the investigations by his congregation into allegations of sexual abuse, he says: ‘I don’t know anything about that.’ He also claims to have no memory of being taken to the national police to be heard by officers, despite the photos which were taken during one of these meetings. ‘I don’t remember that. I was too busy with other things,’ he says.

During the interview Daschbach also chooses to discredit the generous Australian donor Tony Hamilton, who had told Tempo Timor that the former priest had confessed to him that he had been a paedophile all his life. ‘That’s the thing with talking to Tony. He drinks so much wine. He is a little tipsy sometimes,’ smiles Daschbach, suggesting that Hamilton and another donor who was present ‘misinterpreted what I said.’

Then in August 2018, without authorisation from his superiors, Daschbach left SVD premises in Dili to return to Kutet and to live in his current house near Topu Honis. ‘I had decided in the beginning that I would be there (in Dili, TT) six months,’ he says. ‘It was time to leave and go back.’

Daschbach also decided to formally resign from his congregation and suggests he withdrew because of a conflict with SVD. ‘They wanted their hands on Topu Honis,’ he tells Tempo Timor. ‘So I wrote a letter resigning from the SVD. So now they have no formal legal foothold in Topu Honis anymore, because I am no longer their member.’ The break-up didn’t affect him much. ‘It was a small thing for me,’ he says.

Then in November the Vatican decided to laicise the priest removing him from the status of being a member of the clergy because Daschbach had sexually abused children. About that decision Daschbach reacts with a general remark: ‘Rules are rules. People are people.’ When asked by Tempo Timor to explain his words, he responds: ‘Rules are not people. People are not rules. I can’t go any deeper than that.’

The Vatican defrocked Daschbach and the rights of a priest were taken away from him. But Daschbach himself sees that differently. ‘Maybe. Nothing is clear,’ he says. However, that statements is in contradictions with the fact that Daschbach himself signed the Vatican’s documents stating he has been laicized. ‘I never read documents. I just sign them,’ responds Daschbach.

Daschbach insists he is not aware about the allegations that he sexually abused children. ‘No. Of course not. If I was aware of it, I would not be here,’ he responds without further elaborating. ‘Just no comment,’ is his answer to follow-up questions. This has also been his strategy with respect to previous allegations ‘that I sleep around with local women.’ He decided to pay no attention. ‘You have to be thick skinned when you hear rumours.’ His reaction has always been: ‘I never deny, I never confirm, just no comment.’

But when Tempo Timor asks him whether he never touched children, he reacts irritated: ‘That’s my business, not yours.’ Then Daschbach gets up from his chair and finishes the interview: ‘We quit right now. That’s enough.’