 This morning, meeting with the DFAT group, they were asking me what are some of my challenges as women president, and I was jokingly saying one of my challenges is being short. Every time I stand in front of a lectern, you know, I have to make sure that the audience can see my face because otherwise they end up only seeing the top of my head. So that's number one challenge, but thank you very much for the invitation to speak this afternoon. And I join you in acknowledging the presence of the traditional leaders and the people who own this land and thank them for this opportunity to share. I'm not going to say too much, I'd rather listen or respond to questions. I'm hoping that you will have questions to raise. I want to just say a few words about my journey as a woman into this position. You know, I come from a family of ten children, and I'm number eight in the family. So obviously I wasn't a leader in the family because I was very unimportant at the very bottom of the heap. So lots of my brothers and sisters were leader of the family. So this is definitely something I have to learn as a teacher. And as an educator, I want to say that being a teacher is really a leader, even though people like to say that, you know, if you're in political office then you're a leader, but if you're a teacher or a mother, you're not necessarily a leader. I consider those positions very important, you know, and I think as someone who came this far, I started learning about leadership being a mother, even though it's a small family. Still, you have to organize everything around making sure that you have enough money, making sure that you're disciplining the kids like this one, making sure you're on top of their various plans to do otherwise. And coming from the Marshall Islands, I come from a metrilineal society, as you all know. There are lots of saying about the role of women in my culture. You know, there are so much compared to roles of women in the coming men in my culture. So it goes from being the real mother for the family, the nurturer, to being the cheerleader as well for the men. So it goes the old range of roles for women. And I think for us in the Marshall Islands, women have naturally been taken on leadership role because of the cultural expectation as well. Although when we look at the political leadership, we haven't really done that well. We've had, since our constitutional government, had one woman in our parliament until last year when we have now three. This is 38 years later, we have three women in our parliament. So I'm wondering whether we'll take another 38 years before we can have another three women, so we can have six women in our parliament. So it's not easy for women to get elected, as you all know, to political office. There is the lack of organization behind women to support their running for office. As you all know, most of the political groupings are parties. We don't really have political parties in the Marshalls, but we have political grouping. And a lot of these are led by men, so if you're not part of the group, you don't necessarily get the support of the political parties behind you. There is the issue also of resources and especially self-confidence. I think these are the issues I see as impacting women's getting into a leadership position, especially in the political arena. We have to be very confident. I sometimes talk to my colleague, women friends in the Marshall Islands, to put their names out there, because during election time, inevitably very few women would put their names out there. And again, it comes back to confidence. Many women don't want to put their names out there and then lose election. They don't like that. So they want to make sure that they have a better chance before they put their names in the roles for election. So the more women put their names out there, the more they can have self-confidence, or they can take risks and just put their name out there, I think the better chance for more women to be elected. But again, the network of women is important. The support of other women is very important in getting women into a political position. In the Marshall Islands, and I don't know elsewhere, but a lot of women don't support other women running or being in leadership position. It's a lot of the time the women who are the one kind of pulling back on their friends and not helping them, not supporting them to go forward. So it makes it a little bit more difficult. I think a lot of awareness, a lot of discussion on human rights, the ability, when you think about it, it really comes down to social issues and the ability of women to take part in political discussions and decision making. It's the ability to see women as just another group and that can take part in discussion and in leadership as well. So it's human rights. Where are the rights of the half of the population? We often ask that. So when you look at that as opposed to men, for instance, women, I think it probably makes it easier for women to get elected or for. So it's not eyes against them, but it's the ability the need for women to take part in decision making role as well. So for me, I started out as a classroom teacher, as I said earlier, and going into Secretary of Education. As a Secretary of Education, I realized that the extent of your ability to make a difference is very limited because the minister, the people in cabinet make the final decisions on where the resources go. As you know, if you can put resources, if you can make a decision on where the resources go, that's where the strength is. And so I decided to run for politics because I want to be in a role where I can make a difference in terms of where the resources go in education and to be able to make a decision on how education is being managed or direction that education will take. And so that's why I first ran for politics. It wasn't to be in this position. But after four years of being Minister of Education, there were some political issues coming into the new term or the last election of our leader. And I found myself being asked to take on this role. And it just, you know, I like to say that I was at the right place at the right time because I don't think I planned it. None of my friends planned it, but it happened. And a lot of things I think in a small community like the Marshall Islands, people know each other. They know about your background. They know about the responsibilities, the seriousness, the integrity. Everything like that is open book in a small community. So taking responsibilities in my career as Secretary of Education or as Minister of Education, I was able to do a lot of change in the direction of our education in terms of creating a new policy for language, language policy for the Ministry of Education, focusing on ensuring that the native language is taught from first grade all the way up to 12th grade before the emphasis was on English. So we had to do some shifting there. Also, during my tenure as Minister of Education, we were able to pull out the public school system from the Public Service Commission so that the agency can be autonomous and everyone can hire its own staff and create their own salaries and everything that has to do with selecting your own people as well as managing their own budget. So that was a big undertaking for the Ministry of Education at the time because our budget, our constitution placed the responsibility of hiring or promoting on the Public Service Commission. So the ability to move that out of the Public Service Commission into an independent agency took a lot of lobbying and getting a lot of support from our male counterpart in Parliament and other leaders. I think the fact that I know about education a little bit and they could trust that I had some ideas about where to take education in the country, that comforted a lot of our leaders and they were able to vote with us and make that happen. So right now we're moving in, I think, in a much smoother direction and the education is moving. There's a lot of areas to improve yet. We have a long way to go, but at least it's easier for the Ministry to run its program to select the people that they need to be to work on teacher salaries and benefits as well as other issues related to education. Thank you.