5 December 2014
Contributing to Investigations at the Ombudsmans Office
Since joining the organisation, she has mainly assisted with investigation work, particularly where legal issues are concerned. The organisation has been without a lawyer for sometime and before Emma’s arrival, cases came to a stand-still as they needed legal clarification to proceed further.
“What essentially I have ended up doing is helping them out with any legal issues that arise. Before I came, there’d been some investigations where it sort of became road blocked because they did not know how to progress the matter further because the office did not have any legal officer. That’s an area where I helped out.”
“I have also assisted in putting together presentations and preparing towards the Gizo workshop and open day we held this year. I have also assisted in carrying out both formal and informal training for investigation officers.”
Before coming to the Solomon Islands, Emma, who is a lawyer by profession, has been working for 10 years with the Queensland State Government as a lawyer. She has also done pro-bono legal work in communities in Brisbane, Australia.
Although she is doing quite a different job to what she previously did in Australia, she enjoys working closely with the Investigations Director, James Maneforu and Senior Investigations Officer Aaron Kodo at her current host organisation.
“I enjoy working with the people in the office and I like working with my counterpart Aaron. I also enjoy the challenges of my work too because it’s quite different to what I did in Australia where I did a lot of litigation whereas here I am doing different things. It’s quite interesting reading through different legislation and coming up with different solutions and working with the people to work out what best fits here, because what might have worked in Australia probably won’t work here. That’s been really interesting and I really enjoyed that.”
She is also learning new things during her time here.
“I am learning a lot of new things, I have learnt pidgin, a lot about the culture and working in country like the Solomon Islands, its different, the culture is different so I have learnt a lot and as I have said, those challenges with working here and trying to come up with solutions, I have learnt a lot from actually doing that, sometimes as I said the answers might have worked in Australia might not work here, so it’s been a great learning experience.”
Part of her assignment here is to train local counterparts and Emma says she finds the improvement in her counterparts fulfilling.
“I have done a lot of training so what I find fulfilling about my work is seeing the work IO have done and the work I have done with people and seeing their work improve and I have seen that. Just seeing the way that I have worked impact on others and their work improve.”
Emma’s counterpart, Aaron Kodo also agrees with this.
“I have benefitted a lot from the trainings Emma has done since she joined the organisation and she has assisted a lot in cases needing legal clarification. We also consult her when the need arises just to get some enlightenment on issues that sometimes arise in cases we are working on, we find her advice really helpful, because of her wealth of experience in her legal work.”
“I have learnt a lot of new things, among them is a better understanding of the Act that we work under. Her explanation of the act we are working under has brought about a new understanding of the act itself and has clarified some of the questions we had regarding the Act.”