10 Years, One Pink Plastic Flamingo, and the Leadership Lessons I Couldn’t Ignore

A snapshot of my first decade in Timor-Leste 

Ten years ago today, I stepped off a tiny plane onto a stretch of tarmac in Timor-Leste, unaware that this country — and one remote island in particular — would fundamentally reshape both my life and my leadership.
I came to contribute.
I came to serve.
I didn’t expect to be rebuilt.

The Year That Tested Every Assumption I Had
My first posting took me to Atauro Island, a remote, mountainous dot in the ocean surrounded by world-class coral reefs and some of the warmest communities I’ve ever met. From the outside, it could have passed as a travel-magazine paradise. From the inside, it demanded everything of me.

• Transport was scarce.
• Internet barely existed.
• Electricity arrived for a couple of hours if we were lucky.

I lived in a wooden hut with a bucket for mandi showers and a compost toilet that kept me grounded in more ways than one.
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I arrived during the hunger season — when the ocean is too rough to fish and the soil yields very little. At the weekly market, I remember vegetables so wilted no Western supermarket would ever stock them. When they didn’t sell, women carried them back to their villages on foot, returning the following week with the rotten ends cut off.
Isolation hits differently when you know every conversation can travel through a 1,000-person village by sunset. When tensions rose within the organisation I was supporting, there was no anonymity. No off-switch. No escape.
I didn’t know it then, but this was the beginning of my real education in regeneration.

Movement Became My Medicine
Every day, I ran. I swam. I snorkelled the reef. I cycled the hills until my legs burned.
These weren’t hobbies. They were lifelines — the only thing keeping my mind from spiraling.
It was also that first year that my freediving journey began. I heard a small school had opened in Dili and thought it might be a natural extension of my snorkelling. I had no idea then how deeply learning to slow down, trust my body, and stay calm under pressure would later mirror my leadership path.

Then dengue hit.
Hard.

Suddenly, all my usual coping strategies were gone. Running was impossible. Snorkelling was out of the question. Even sitting upright was an effort.
So I turned inward toward breath, stillness, and yoga. What started as survival became a doorway into presence, reflection, and leadership from a grounded place.

A few months later, I travelled to India to study with teachers whose traditions stretch far beyond anything in the West. That training became a foundational layer of how I lead today.

Life at the Coast Changed My Trajectory
Living on Atauro, working with coastal communities and observing the opening of the first locally managed marine area, didn’t just shape my days;  it shaped my direction.

I saw firsthand how climate change shows up early and unevenly: in food security, in shifting fish stocks, in communities forced to adapt long before global policy catches up.

That proximity to the ocean, to livelihoods, to fragility and resilience is what turned my work toward climate, marine conservation, and the blue economy. Not as abstract ideas, but as lived realities.

Dili, Containers, and the Things You Learn to Live Without
My early days in Dili had their own rhythm. The expat Facebook group wasn’t debating geopolitics, it was tracking a tonic-water shortage. Butter arrivals sparked supermarket sprints. Yoghurt was so rare I started making my own.

Ten years later, I still make my own yoghurt — now less from necessity and more from a desire to reduce plastic. Supermarkets are better stocked. Life is easier. We still don’t have a functional postal system but we do have road names, office addresses, and everyone knows how to drop a Google Pin.

Progress isn’t linear. But it’s real.

Reverse Culture Shock and the Flamingo
After that intense first year, I flew to Auckland (New Zealand) and went straight to a beach music festival.
Culture shock doesn’t even begin to describe it: people dancing in swimwear, while I felt overdressed in the shortest Atauro dress I had dared wear once.

Then I saw them: massive blow-up flamingos floating in the water.

Pink plastic symbols of excess. They felt worlds away from Atauro — from families carrying unsold vegetables home, from communities navigating scarcity with dignity.

Fast forward to today, and Timor-Leste looks different:

• Timorese girls wear the same dresses I once didn’t dare to.
• You can rent swan floaties on Dili’s beaches.
• Young people follow global trends online.

While poverty and inequality persist, the pace of change is undeniable. Supermarkets are better stocked, road names exist, office addresses work, and Google Pins are second nature.

And the flamingo? It no longer stands out.

Crisis, Leadership, and Learning Under Pressure
Over the past decade, I’ve also navigated:

• COVID repatriation of all international staff and volunteers
• Two major floods that made my house uninhabitable
• An overnight funding cut caused by global US funding freezes

These experiences — alongside witnessing climate impacts firsthand — reinforced that leadership and regeneration are inseparable. Awareness of our climate crisis is heightened today, and the stakes for leaders are higher than ever.

Visibility, Leadership, and the Flamingo Revisited
In these ten years, I grew too.
I moved from supporting a grassroots NGO to becoming Country Director of an international one.
I braved the unknown and launched my own business.
For a long time, my work focused on empowering local leaders, which often meant stepping into the background. That still matters deeply.

But this morning, as I played with bold yellow-and-pink designs for my new business cards, something clicked:

Being visible and empowering others go hand in hand.

When the world shifts, the way you stand in it has to shift too. And when a pink flamingo no longer stands out, sometimes the answer isn’t to shrink ; it’s to be even bolder — not for ego, but so the work, the mission, and the voices you stand beside are impossible to ignore.

Full Circle — And What I Now Teach Others
When I arrived, Timor-Leste was thirteen years into its independence — a teenager finding its voice. Today, it stands taller. More confident. Newly ascended to ASEAN. Clearer in its place in the region.

I’ve grown alongside it. And the core lesson from Atauro still anchors me:
Regeneration is not a nice-to-have. It is a leadership responsibility.

​You can’t lead boldly if you’re permanently depleted.
You can’t hold others through uncertainty if you’ve lost access to yourself.

That insight now sits at the heart of my upcoming book,
BOLDER: A Leadership Mindset and Framework Forged at the Edge — built around six leadership shifts, including braving the unknown and regenerating for sustained impact.
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A full-circle moment: the foreword is written by Timor-Leste’s President, José Ramos-Horta,  someone I met in my very first week in the country, long before I understood how deeply this place would shape me.

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If You’re Building or Funding Work That Truly Matters
If you’re building or funding work that truly matters — in climate, oceans, community resilience, or systems change — and you’re looking for experienced support that understands both the human edge and the operational reality, let’s talk.

I work with organisations and leaders at the frontline through advisory partnerships, interim leadership roles, and executive coaching — supporting moments of growth, transition, and pressure where leadership capacity makes or breaks impact.
This is especially relevant when the stakes are high: during scale-up, crisis, restructuring, or when complexity outpaces old leadership models.
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If partnership, trust, and long-term impact matter to you, I’d welcome a conversation about how we could work together.