Kirsty Sword Gusmão, (born Kirsty Sword; 19 April 1966) is an Australian-East Timorese activist who served as the First Lady of East Timor from 2002 until 2007. She is married to Xanana Gusmão, former prime minister and president of East Timor, though they separated in 2015. She is the founding director of the Alola Foundation, which seeks to improve the lives of women in Timor-Leste, a nation with one of the world's lowest per capita GDPs. Early years and education Sword was born in 1966 in Melbourne, Australia, to schoolteachers Brian and Rosalie Sword, and was raised there and in Bendigo. She attended Eaglehawk Primary School, where her father was the principal and her mother a music teacher in the 1970s. She was taught her first Indonesian words by her father when she was four years old. She was a promising ballet dancer, but decided not to pursue it as a career. As a teen, Sword travelled to Bali and Jakarta with her father and brother. After Golden Square Secondary College, she attended Monash University and the University of Melbourne in the 1980s where she completed a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree, majoring in Indonesian and Italian, and a Diploma of Education. In 1985, while studying Indonesian at Monash, Sword met Timor-Leste students and took up their struggle for independence. Her father Brian died in 1998. Career Sword worked as an administrative secretary with the Overseas Service Bureau (now Australian Volunteers International) until 1991, when she joined the Refugee Studies Program at Oxford University in England as assistant to the development coordinator. Later that year, she travelled to East Timor as a researcher and interpreter for a Yorkshire Television documentary film called In Cold Blood: The massacre of East Timor about political and social developments in the territory. From 1992 to 1996, Sword lived and worked in Jakarta, Indonesia, as an English teacher, humanitarian aid worker and human rights campaigner. At the same time, she became a clandestine activist and spy for the Timor-Leste (East Timorese) resistance to Indonesian rule. Her resistance code name was Ruby Blade, later changed to Mukya (tr. 'fragrant') by Xanana Gusmão. Regarding the eventual media revelation that a member of a supposedly neutral organisation was spying against a host country, whether any lasting damage was done to the capacity of humanitarian aid and human rights organisations to work freely in Indonesia is difficult to assess,