totally inspiring ... mentor meg

Last night I had the honour of sitting in on a lecture from one of PNGs most respected and influential women - Meg Taylor. A Dame no less.

Meg's heritage is no less exceptional. The product of the Australian pioneer Jim Taylor and her mum from Mt Hagen, Meg and her half-siblings grew up on one of the first coffee plantations in Goroka. The paths she followed from here on in sound eerily familiar to anyone 'educated' from my parents generation ... trained by missionaries in the mountains and packed off to boarding school in Australia where she was regularly at the bottom of her class and got expelled in one instance. Meg came home, took up law at UPNG and has gone on ever since to an illustrious career ... serving under our first Prime Minister at Independence ... She was Ambassador of Papua New Guinea to the United States, Mexico and Canada in Washington DC from 1989-94. She is co-founder of Conservation Melanesia and has served on the Boards of the World Wildlife Fund-USA and the World Resources Institute. And the impressive list goes on ... you can see why I am almost insanely jealous of her career. And 6 years ago Meg was appointed the first Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman for the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA). She does an incredible job and her continued success makes her one of the most respected people in the field of international development projects - can you imagine!!

So yeah ... Meg says if you want a career, you want to head somehwere, its never by perfect planning ... always by taking what opportunities come up and being able to grab them because you're hungry and you have the experience.

She answers directly to Wolfowitz, the President of the World Bank and still has time to email me with news and information ... shes such an incredible example of what possibility and hard work and ambition can do and she makes my dreams seem like they're just rungs further up the ladder.

She had so many brilliant things to say so I am going to try recall here of some:

• EVERY PROBLEM HAS A SOLUTION. Work work work through the issues until you find it.
• The HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX is our most important measure of success ... not our GDP (very sad considering PNG comes 133rd out of 170 nations on the HDI scale!)
• Look to the RESOURCES available when sourcing solutions to problems ... handouts/aid/assistance can paralyse rather than promote real development.
• Be HUNGRY
• Be PATIENT
• EVERY ACTION HAS A CONSEQUENCE

I could go on and on. Lovely Meg and her sister Daisy are family friends and I just think its such a privilege to be able to have a coffee with a woman who counts Jared Diamond amongst her friends!! JARED DIAMOND - my hero!!! Meg who exercises such integrity and loyalty. Her drive and her work are such beacons in this age in this country when so much seems a little desperate and a lot lost. She demands we exercise our SOCIAL CONSCIENCE and start DIALOGUES ... people in PNG need to discuss and argue and think on so many different levels, but most importantly, on the street, in the village, on the buai corner, on the pmv, in the esipay queue.

She gave me a kick up the bum Meg did. And she's making me look up. "Look up kid" she said. And I am trying Meg, I'm going to try harder.