'Tough cookie' tames PNG's warriors

0 Comments | AFP, July, 2007

MOUNT HAGEN, Papua New Guinea (AFP) — Captain Doctor Roselyn Wia describes herself as a tough cookie. She has to be: thousands of men from a male-dominated warrior tradition salute her and strip on her command.

Wia, 32, is the only female doctor and one of just five women in the 2,000-strong military of Papua New Guinea, where many tribes made contact with the outside world less than a lifetime ago.

Her medical degree, rank and authority over men are signs of the rapid changes shaking a country where the transition from the past to the present has been more abrupt than in most places on earth.

The charming, softly-spoken mother-of-two in military fatigues told AFP in a recent interview that her grandfather was one of the first warriors in the remote...