By anyone's standards, it's been a long day. The flight to Australia, the burden of intermittent media commitments, the trip to Sydney's Taronga Zoo with two screaming toddlers. It's her birthday, too, and no call yet from hubby, President Xanana Gusmao. Yet Kirsty Sword Gusmao, first lady of the fledgling nation of East Timor, is undaunted. "Xanana always either forgets my birthday or gets the date wrong. But, you know, I guess he's got a few other things on his mind."Sword Gusmao also has plenty on her mind.
Articulate and highly intelligent, she is inevitably drawn into comment on issues of geopolitical significance.
Top of the agenda this week has been the Australian Government's shiftiness over maritime boundaries – a so-called "greedy grab" for Timor Sea oil which could cost her adopted nation billions in oil revenue.
"When you consider that Australia is one of the richest countries in the world and East Timor has just been rated the poorest country in East Asia, it's pretty clear which country is in more urgent need of the resources in the Timor Sea," Sword Gusmao says.
"Consider that 12 per cent of East Timorese children die before their fifth birthday, that most people don't have access to clean water, that many schools are still without roofs. It's really important that we rebuild the country with a firm economic base. Clearly, those oil resources are vital to being able to guarantee that base."
While Sword Gusmao clearly views the macro- and micro-dynamics of nation-building as inextricably entwined, it's grassroots issues which are the primary reason for her trip to Australia.
In particular, she's come to promote the Alola Foundation, whose broad aim is to boost the quality of life of East Timorese women, and the Friendship Schools Program, an initiative fostering links between Australian and East Timorese schools. As a former Melbourne girl who has devoted 11 years to helping the people of East Timor, she's a natural link between indigenous East Timorese causes and the West.
Kirsty Sword married Xanana Gusmao in July 2000. They have two children, Alexandre, 3, and Kay Olok, aged 18 months. The story of their affair is straight out of a work of spy fiction.Sword, a Jakarta-based English teacher, had become interested in the plight of East Timor under Indonesian occupation. Adopting the pseudonym Ruby Blade, she facilitated communications between the East Timorese resistance and its jailed counterparts in Indonesia. It was in a dank Indonesian prison that she met Gusmao, the charismatic leader of East Timor's Falantil guerrilla movement.
Though 20 years apart in age, the seeds of romance were sown.Today, the President and first lady live in a modest residence in the hills above Dili. They eschew the trappings of status, and rarely enjoy an idle moment.
Social life is an almost entirely foreign concept. But then, things have long been that way for both of them.
"It's virtually impossible to be Kirsty's friend unless you work with her," says Sarah Niner, a Melbourne-based director of the Alola Foundation and biographer of Xanana Gusmao (the biography is currently being marked as a PHD thesis and is yet to be published).
Niner met Sword when she was first researching Gusmao's biography.
Gusmao was in jail, and Sword was feverishly enacting her role as a key liaison between the two disparate groups of East Timorese resistance. The two women quickly became friends.
"Now, as then, Kirsty just has no spare time. People have this romantic idea that she's the first lady so she must be hopping around doing all these lovely things. The truth is, she's the hardest-working person I know.
"To be her friend, you've got to work with her. There's no time for anything else. You can't go out and have facials. She's too busy.
You've got to sit down and write a proposal to the World Bank for money to set up a breastfeeding-awareness program. That's how you become friends with Kirsty."
A picture is forming here of a cool-tempered individual with a level of commitment most of us could only aspire to. But has Niner ever seen her close friend lose her cool?
"No, I've never seen her blow her top. She's worked in human rights all her life, so obviously she's got a strong sense of outrage. She was really angry about Alola being kidnapped. But she funnels the outrage into action, into strategy."
Juliana "Alola" dos Santos was abducted aged 15 in the violence which followed East Timor's Popular Consultation (independence vote) in 1999.
She remains captive in West Timor, having been paraded as a "war trophy" and repeatedly raped by members of a militia group.
Formed in 2001, the organisation named in Alola's honour continues the delicate process of lobbying for her release. It also seeks to protect and support other victims of gender-based violence.
"There's a very high incidence of domestic violence in East Timor," Sword Gusmao laments. "It's another issue that we're trying to address through our work."
More recently, the Alola Foundation has widened its agenda to focus on the needs of East Timorese women generally.
'Nowadays our focus is more broadly on issues that concern East Timorese women, their children and their families," Sword Gusmao explains. "We have a national breastfeeding association of East Timor that works closely with women at a grassroots level to promote the benefits of breast milk.
"We also have an economic- empowerment program which is promoting East Timorese handicrafts. These are very much the domain of East Timorese women, particularly the poorest rural women. We're trying to find an export market for these handicrafts." One of the great ironies of life in East Timor has been the drying up of the domestic market for handicrafts. Paradoxically, the Indonesian military were a major source of sales during their occupation. UN and Australian forces would also typically buy a selection to take home as souvenirs.
But with the UN presence being scaled down, demand is on the wane.
The most popular form of local handicraft is the "Tai", a hand-woven length of cloth worn as a traditional dress. The enormously complex dyed garments can take one woman a full year to make. Alola is attempting to stimulate interest in Tais among high-end collectors of indigenous art, with a stall at the Sydney Aboriginal and Oceanic Art Fair in May.
Outside of the Alola Foundation, Sword Gusmao's energy is taken up with the Friendship Schools Program. Launched a year ago at her alma mater, Eaglehawk Primary School near Bendigo, the program seeks to develop cross-cultural understanding between young people in Australia and East Timor.
"Kids in this country are extremely keen to be able to help refurbish and in some cases rebuild schools so that kids have got exercise books and pencils – and even roofs. In Timor, these things are not to be taken for granted.
"It's tremendously rewarding for Australian kids to know that the fruits of their fund-raising activities are having concrete benefits and that they can have a long-term relationship with the kids who are the beneficiaries of their hard work. It's not just a one-off donation. They can actually build relationships and hopefully at one point have exchanges of students and teachers and build some really meaningful bonds."
In a nation where the pupil/teacher ratio stands at 62, every little bit helps. And that pretty much sums up the Kirsty Sword Gusmao approach to nation-building. One small initiative at a time. One building block after another.
But what about the future? Will she still call the tiny nation of East Timor home long after her husband has hung up his presidential boots?
"Yeah, yeah. I'm sure I'll spend extended periods of time in Australia as well, because obviously it's where my roots are. But yeah, I feel that East Timor is my home. It's the place where I've given birth to my kids, and where they'll grow up and be educated, so it definitely feels like home and it's definitely the place I'm committed to."
Above all, Sword Gusmao remains committed to life with Xanana – though the commitment must get stretched a little when he fails to call on her birthday. National hero or not, some things a husband simply can't afford to forget.
'Actually, this year I got my birthday cake on the 18th of March. He got the day and the month wrong but, you know, I forgive him. It was actually quite a happy misfortune because he's away in Portugal while I'm in Australia. We wouldn't have been together anyway, so we got to eat the birthday cake together with the kids, which was great."