"I don't believe that the gains that have been made in the last two years would have been made as quickly or as effectively without the interaction of something like the peace monitoring group".

"I think the things that I will take away are the small things. Actually one of the first things that I did there was, a small number of us were invited to talk to one of the local schools and school children about National Book Week and we were asked to talk about books and the importance in our lives. And because I was a journalist before I joined the Army I spoke about being a writer and books being important to me in that sense. Afterwards one of the young people who was a young girl who was 17 came up to me and spoke to me about the fact that she had written about her experiences in the crisis and she wanted to be a writer also. And so we became quite good friends in my time there because I read a lot of her work and gave her some background on what she may be able to do in getting published and where she may be able to go in terms of her higher education. It was quite amazing because she was 17 and finishing Grade 7 and the interaction with the young people was one of my favourite elements of it."

CAPTAIN BELINDA BYRNE, PR OFFICER, PEACE MONITORING GROUP BOUGAINVILLE