Welcome to my regular series entitled "My Light Bulb Moment". This column highlights the "blinding flash of insight" business, cultural and sports leaders have had in their career, and how this changed their lives forever.
Sometimes the gravity of the world's problems can overwhelm us; many of us want to help but don't know how. It's easy to get caught up with the "I can't do anything to make a difference so I won't bother" mantra. But change happens in increments at the individual level, with each of us doing something small but vital that adds up. Look at the movement to women's right to vote in New Zealand, enough people took part -- women and men -- until our societal fabric shifted. We've never looked back.
Rachael Le Mesurier
Rachael Le Mesurier, executive director of Oxfam New Zealand, remembers a pivotal moment when everything changed. "In my early 20s, while at university in the UK, I got involved in a campaign to stop the deportation of a young woman named Afia Begum and her child. Her husband had died in a fire and, despite him having residency, the Home Office had ruled that she had to be deported, away from her UK-based family, to Bangladesh.
"Walking along Brick Lane on the march, I remember a moment when I thought -- I could have been born into her world, into the powerlessness of her position, it could have been me. It was just luck that I ended up in a Pakeha middle-class family, with two passports. I realised how much injustice is underpinned by inequalities in income, wealth, gender, legal status, race, education, health, safety and access to legal protection -- wherever we are born."
