The devastation is complete. Little escaped the political violence of last September after a popular vote ended 24 years of brutal military rule by neighboring Indonesia. For weeks afterward, anti-independence militias, Timorese thugs with rumored ties to the Indonesian military, roamed the country furiously burning everything in their path, leaving only scorched earth behind them.

Now East Timor, the world's newest nation, must build an economic, political and physical infrastructure from little more than ashes.

The work has already begun. On one street corner, an elderly entrepreneur sells powdered milk and candles from a wooden shack. On another, workers tap nails into wooden beams or dab new concrete onto the walls of buildings that a few days before looked a total loss. And just a short walk from the docks that were once the economic heart of this harbor city is the nucleus of East Timor's reconstruction: the government administration building.

The fresh white paint and unbroken windows of its porticoed flanks are alone enough to make the building stand out. But its true significance is signaled by the rack of functioning satellite dishes on its roof, the braids of orderly telephone and power cables that wrap its sides and the loud talk of people on mobile phones in the parking lot.

Inside this Iberian architectural treasure, the United Nations has taken on the role of interim government while the fledgling nation prepares to elect its own government next year. From a generator-powered control room, borrowed bureaucrats run makeshift ministries - agriculture, trade, fiscal affairs - using hastily wired computers. Operatives buzz back and forth, setting tariffs, planning roads and budgeting aid programs. E-mail, Internet access and a high-powered intranet lubricate the wheels of an ad hoc bureaucracy in a country with no reliable electricity, little phone service and virtually no PCs.

Away from the administrative fray, though, toward the back of the complex, is where East Timor's future is really being laid out. Behind tinted windows that eclipse the midday sun, Pedro Braga sits at a corner desk in a tightly packed office. The head of the U.N. interim government's IT telecommunications division, Braga's job is to bring East Timor into the digital age.

Half Portuguese and half Chinese, Braga was born 66 years ago on Macao - an island that, like East Timor, was once a colony of Portugal. Right now, he's talking on one of the few functioning desk phones in the country. It's a short call. Braga has things to do, and an engineer's economy with words.

He picks up a sheaf of papers he's been working on mornings, evenings and weekends for months. "Here it is," he tells me, "the future of the country."

Specifically, it is an outline of the series of herculean tasks required to rebuild East Timor's telecommunications system. It's pretty bleak stuff. Last September, before the violence, this nation of 770,000 people had only 8,000 fixed telephone lines. Now it has 2,000. Of 28 telephone structures nationwide, including buildings and telephone towers, only one remains undamaged, the central switch in Dili.