Nancy Wii went to school with girls wearing grass skirts. Now she works among men wearing cargo pants.
At 21, she became Papua New Guinea's first female commercial pilot, rising through the ranks before she was promoted and became the first female commanding officer in the country's defence force.
"They didn't give it to me because I'm a female," Lieutenant-Colonel Wii said.
"They gave it to me because I earned it."
At a time when geopolitics has lasered international attention on PNG's military and security, the woman leading its air unit comes with an extraordinary personal story.
Her rise is reflective of the unit itself, which is getting back into the skies after years of being unable to fly.
Shattering the aviation glass ceiling
Nancy Wii grew up in a village as the eldest of 11 children, and says it was her father who encouraged her to seek a non-traditional career in aviation.
He was PNG's minister for civil aviation at the time and told her that in other countries there were female pilots and he thought she should learn to fly.
Her parents took out a loan so she could go to New Zealand, stay with a local family, and study.
"It was hard. I was dreading how I would sit at the table and eat with all these white people," she says while laughing.
But at 19 years old, she got her pilot's licence in just three months.
Her family took out another loan and sought help from the New Zealand government to send her back to earn her commercial licence.
"[It] was very motivating — the fact they believed in me, that they trusted me. So, I could not let them down," she said.
Ten months after returning to New Zealand, she was qualified and returned to her home as the country's first female commercial pilot, shattering PNG's aviation glass ceiling.
The stigma around women on planes
Despite the historic achievement, Lieutenant-Colonel Wii faced a new set of problems once she was in the role.
"[Some] passengers, when they saw me on the right-hand seat, they refused to fly because they didn't want the flight attendant in the front seat," she said, explaining they assumed she was a flight attendant because she was a woman.
"So in the remote areas everyone wanted to argue. It wasn't easy. It was really tough."
But she soon began to win people over, particularly after taking on a regular route out of Daru, the capital of PNG's Western Province.
"I think I earned my respect there," she said.
Little by little, she witnessed changes in people's attitudes, until eventually she felt she "had the support of the population".
"Everywhere they saw me they just rushed to me, shook hands with me, they couldn't believe it — everyone was proud of me," she said.
She said people would say things like, "This is the first female pilot," and wanted their daughters to follow the same career path.
In 2005, when the then-prime minister Sir Michael Somare put the call out for civilian pilots to join the Papua New Guinea Defence Force, Nancy Wii was one of two women who joined up.
But the PNGDF's Air Transport Wing was plagued by problems. And issues around funding, maintenance, and staffing, among others, saw the unit regularly grounded.
With no ability to fly, Lieutenant-Colonel Wii left, only to later be lured back to work as a squadron leader responsible for the trainees.
The issues with actually getting airborne remained, and morale was low.
Even now, the hanger the unit operates out of is littered with aircraft that clearly cannot fly.
But things are improving for PNG's defence aviation industry, particularly as Australia and other nations ramp up their involvement.
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Story first published on ABC News