I’m in Adelaide today, and it’s hot. Really hot! I’ve acclimatised to Narooma’s year-round temperate clime, and Radelaide’s summer swelter has come as a bit of a shock. I’m visiting my Mum for a couple of weeks (lovely) and may incidentally avail myself of the literary and cultural delights of Writer’s Week and the Adelaide Festival (excellent!).

It’s now just under six weeks ’till my departure and I’m starting to get very excited. This whole writing in the south of France thing is becoming imminent and I confess I’m occasionally experiencing qualms of trepidation. I’ll leave the cold feet for now, but will perhaps explore this increasing phenomenon in a future post …

Today I’m going to take you on a quick tour of the highlights of my past 13 years and how they have shaped my present passion for authorship. You may recall in my last post that a visit to the Solomon Islands with AusAID inspired me to save the world’s children from injustice and poverty. When I dream, I dream big! Going solo clearly wasn’t an option, so I looked around for a workplace that would enable me to add my mite to the cause.

In terms of organisations that dream big they don’t get much bigger than World Vision. WV is a global advocacy, relief and development NGO with an annual budget of $2.5 billion and more than 50,000 staff working in almost 100 countries. It is Christian, child-focused and community based, and strives to ensure that children are healthy, educated, protected and given the opportunities to live full lives, free from injustice. I decided WV was the place for me.

I joined the organisation in 2006 as their head of public policy, based in Canberra. My job was basically to convince the Australian government to give more and better aid to address global poverty and to represent WV to them as a desirable partner for achieving this aim. Initially I engaged with John Howard’s conservative government that wasn’t really into development at all, but shortly afterwards Kevin Rudd swept to power and declared that Australia was getting back in the aid game. It was a heady time.

All the random skills I had developed in my eclectic career came together in this role. I was an advocate, communicator, facilitator, spokesperson, negotiator, trouble-shooter and of course, writer, though my writing now focused on developing compelling evidence-based policy recommendations and proposals. I managed to get quite a few runs on the board and caught the eye of those higher up the WV hierarchy. WV is a federated structure, made up of a small Global Centre (the Feds), Support Offices (the ones that make the money, Australia, US, UK, Germany etc) and Field Offices (the ones where the real work of tackling poverty gets done).

I was tapped to go federal as WV’s global Director of External Relations. My job was now to coordinate representation of WV with UN agencies and processes like the G20. I would also become responsible for training our senior leaders and advocacy staff, building their skills for engagement and influence. The only problem was that I had to move to New York.

HWB loved it and I loathed it. The Big Apple might be a fun place to visit, but it wasn’t my cup of tea as a place to live. It is famously the city that never sleeps. I certainly didn’t. I was serenaded by a nightly cacophany of sirens, horns, reversing trucks and jack hammers. I waded through knee-deep snow to rat-infested trains and dodged racing commuters who would rather die than make eye-contact. I came home to Australia after my first 18 months and realised I hadn’t seen a star or a bird that wasn’t a pigeon or sparrow in all that time. Happily, my new role required me to do a lot of travel that enabled me to escape the city, and when I say a lot, I mean a LOT. I spent 25 of the first 52 weeks of my New York posting in far flung parts of the world, and over the past 10 years I’ve visited more than 50 countries in the line of duty. How lucky am I?

I’ve been privileged to visit many of WV’s programmes, meet with local communities and see first hand the difference that our work makes. I’ve trained advocacy staff and leaders around the world on how to influence their governments and hold them accountable. I’ve been shocked and saddened and enraged by injustices of all kinds, and inspired and awed by the resilience and persistent hope with which communities meet calamities beyond imagining.

Most inspiring of all have been the times when I’ve had a chance to meet and talk with children. Just look into the eyes of this little girl and see if it doesn’t make you want to leap forth and make the world a better place for her …

Children aren’t just recipients of our aid. They are agents of their own destinies and one of World Vision’s aims is to empower children to be advocates themselves. I have participated in many children’s groups and heard kids from many backgrounds speak of their dreams and desires. They are so simple. Safety, enough food, a chance to go to school, a hope to be able to contribute to their communities. And always one kid who wants a new football and the construction of a playing field.

One of the most personally satisfying moments I had was in Nepal, just after the devastating earthquake in 2015. I had been visiting our WV disaster response centre in the north of the country and had asked if there was anything I could do personally. It’s sometimes hard to equate lobbying for an inclusion of a child rights clause in in a Global Compact in Geneva with a tangible difference for real children facing real problems in their communities. Our staff advised that there was a remote community whose little school had been completely destroyed. The children had nothing, but needed books and pens and backpacks. For a trifling (for me) amount of money I was able to have our team purchase enough kit for 50 children. We treked up the inaccessible mountain and delivered the little back packs of goodies to the children. I’ve never felt more alive.

But is hasn’t all been work. Sometimes, when I had two trainings running back to back I would have a spare weekend in between gigs where I could escape the training room and explore a bit, and these snatched moments have offered me some of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have white-water rafted the source of the Nile in Uganda,
made bouza (sort of dumplings) in a yurt in Mongolia, hung out with the Maasai in the Mara, been photographed in the Lady Di pose at the Taj Mahal, had close encounters with mountain gorillas in Rwanda, zip-lined in Costa Rica and sailed a dhow at sunset in the waters off Zanzibar.

Apart from the gratitude I have for living in lovely Narooma, and for my dear family and friends, I am filled to the brim with thankfullness for the chance that I’ve had to get a glimpse into so many cultures and the lives of so many children. We talk about Australia being the lucky country. Well it’s true, and it distresses me that so many Australians don’t always seem to realise just how lucky we are. The world is a rich and wonderful place, despite the ongoing injustices that still need to be challenged by the idealists and believers. There are stories of hope to tell, and I want to tell them.