Know your people. Get their trust. Ask for their vote.

Disclaimer: if your goal is advocacy for women’s rights, please don’t read this article. It will offend you. If you get offended easily, don’t read. But if your goal is “winning” an election in PNG as a women read on.

There are the idealistic, modern, Western way of doing things. And then there is the PNG or Melanesian Way of doing things. For those of us who live our lives between two cultures, we learn to act appropriately depending on where we are.

I know of women, some of them my colleagues and some sisters, who are highly educated. They are the classic modern women. In Port Moresby or Australia, they live the modern women they are.

But when they go back to their villages, they take their place as delegated by hundreds of years of customary conventions. Conventions which says the men are…