By Lia Timson
The last time Ornella Byak came to North Sydney’s oldest watering hole was after her year 12 graduation, nearly seven years ago. She doesn’t remember much of that day, except being here with friends and friends’ parents – and that a difficult phase of her life was over.
Then, the young entrepreneur and charity warrior was hoping to fulfil a promise she made to herself in Timor-Leste when she was 14.
“It was a weird time, to be honest,” she says. Her peers were getting cars for their 18th birthdays but Byak was thinking that sort of money could build a classroom across the Timor Sea.
Ornella Byak outside the Rag & Famish Hotel, opposite her alma mater, Monte Sant’ Angelo Mercy College.Credit: Edwina Pickles
She would go on to study technology and innovation at the University of Technology Sydney, leave a volunteer group she helped found after that trip, establish a charity, set up a board of directors and a team of volunteers, forge a career in private equity, build contacts, become a chief executive and build the foundations for a new education system that one day may change the country she now calls home.
It’s been nearly seven months since the 25-year-old sold her apartment, packed everything she owned into four bags, convinced her boss she could work remotely and moved to a rural township in Australia’s smallest northern neighbour with her dog, Ollie. She’s back on a short trip to Sydney and Melbourne to speak at the youth event Stand Tall and see donors and her employer, Parc Capital. I take the opportunity to meet a young woman who has devoted her life to improving the lot of young people in another nation.
Homesick for a steak and beer on tap: Byak’s 250g rump steak with mash, mushroom sauce and green beans. Credit: Edwina Pickles
We pick the Rag & Famish Hotel mainly because having settled in Same, rural Timor-Leste, Byak is desperate for a beer on tap and a good Aussie steak.
It takes us no time at all to order exactly that, via QR code, of course. She spends a few extra seconds considering the beers. “I like to know my options before making a decision,” she says, giving me an early clue to her personality. She picks a schooner of Asahi Super Dry. Her medium rare 250g rump steak comes with mash, a creamy mushroom sauce and green beans. She’s rapt.
I take the other pub staple, a chicken parma with salad and chips and a glass of rosé. Making my parma “no ham” is an easy tick on the order; Byak shakes her head with a smile, things are so different in Australia.
And therein lies the kernel of her drive: Why should she have an easy life and a privileged education while children in developing nations struggle and have little schooling, if any at all?
“Just because I was born here and they were born there? That’s not right.”
Byak is all in black with no make-up, her hair natural and flowing, her blue eyes dancing with animation as she describes the Timorese kids now attending the school she opened a little over a year ago. “My kids, yes, they are my kids”, she says, beaming. The Bakhita School of Excellence is her love.
BETTER founder and chief executive Ornella Byak has plotted the charity’s future until at least 2040. “I’ll be 41 then.”Credit: Edwina Pickles
We go back a long way for such a short life: she was social justice captain in primary school, then attended Monte Sant’ Angelo Mercy College, a private Catholic school immediately across the road from where we sit. The oldest of two girls, she was always devoted to causes but was taught by her parents to pitch for her every wish. Literally. She recounts making PowerPoint presentations, with well-considered arguments, to obtain approval for things other teenagers take for granted: a new phone, a Facebook account, a dog. Once granted, a contract was drawn up. Later, pocket money for household chores, like mowing the lawns or ironing, was paid upon invoices. The idea was to appreciate the value of things.
Chicken parma, no ham, at the Rag & Famish.Credit: Edwina Pickles
“I learnt transactional skills,” she says. “It was very much tough love.”
Adolescence was complicated. She revealed to the Stand Tall audience that she’s been medicated for depression since age 13 and that she, too, has self-doubts, but her goals keep her going.
She left home at 16 and lived for a while with her aunt, Sarah Derry, former chief executive of the Accor Group in Australia, and her cousins. Derry is also Byak’s godmother and something of a mentor to her, but she says, “It works both ways.”
“She’s an incredible young woman, and I’m in awe of her,” Derry says. “She’s a force of nature.”
“Ever since she was a little girl, she’s had a need to make a contribution, to help other people.”
Byak first went to Timor after finding an ad in a church bulletin promoting a trip to the Saint Josephine Bakhita Centre, which was named after the Sudanese saint who lived in Italy. Bakhita was Byak’s own confirmation saint and her mother’s name is Josephine. She highlighted the coincidences in the presentation to her parents. “That was my sales pitch, and I managed to sell it.” And so mother and daughter set off with other churchgoers on the trip.
After five days, as the group was leaving with notes on needs ranging from sanitation to health and education, a girl approached her and said, “Please don’t forget about us”.
Byak threw herself head-first into the idea of improving education in the country because, “I was getting a very expensive education here in Sydney, surely I can do something with that”.
It’s a story she has told many times, a pitch she has made again and again to investors.
With the church group, she helped redevelop a senior school. After that project and another launching an e-learning program, she realised she needed to reform the curriculum, not just the infrastructure. At 19, she founded BETTER (Building East Timor Through Education and Resources) to establish her own K-12 school. She then wrote to 700 potential sponsors and was met either with silence or remarks about her young age.
Ornella Byak, right, then 14, during her first visit to Timor-Leste.
But, as Derry says, Byak does not take no for an answer. Now the school is in its second year (Timorese President Jose Ramos-Horta, its patron, opened it along with Cardinal Virgilio do Carmo da Silva), and the foundation has raised more than $350,000, she wrote back to 300 of those on the original list with proof of results and a plea for more.
She needs more money because she has already plotted the charity’s business case until 2040. First up, there will be a larger Bakhita School of Excellence built on five hectares donated by ancestral landowners in Same. It will have 30 classrooms, a library, a multipurpose dining hall, sports fields, a medical clinic, water bore, staff accommodation and brick-making facilities. Its partial opening is slated for April 2025. Then, there will be two more schools in 2026 and 2028, and by 2040, the teaching program, which has been developed by volunteer educators in Australia based on the Timorese curriculum with elements of the Australian one, will be available for a national rollout.
Ramos-Horta has no doubts that Byak will achieve those goals. “Yes, it can happen. She is a very smart and pragmatic person. She doesn’t just daydream about something, she actually works hard every day,” he says.
Ornella Byak, centre, Cardinal Virgilio do Carmo da Silva and Timorese President Jose Ramos-Horta, right, officially open the Bakhita School of Excellence in Same, Timor-Leste, in May 2023.
Timor-Leste, with a population of 1.3 million, is a young nation that became independent only in 2002. Its population is also very young—some 50 per cent are under 19. In 2020, UNICEF estimated that 47.8 per cent of Timorese children were living under the national poverty line.
If Byak succeeds in helping remake the education of the current generation and set up that of the next, she will likely make a much bigger contribution to the country than she ever thought possible.
“At UTS, we were taught to think about reaching for the stars and the moon. If you’re thinking out there, you could get an outcome in the middle here,” she says, gesticulating, adding that it would already be a lot more than if one’s sights were set lower.
Her motivation is a set of census and UNICEF numbers she takes with her everywhere: 58 per cent of the Timorese population left or never attended school; 92 per cent of students don’t make it to year 10; 70 per cent of year 1 students fail basic learning outcomes.
Ornella Byak and staff with school kids in Same, Timor-Leste.
Her goal is to teach 650 K-12 students a year in each of three schools to provide a standard of education not dissimilar to the one she experienced, but for very little – parents contribute four hours of service or $8 worth of farm produce a month.
“I’m very pleased and touched that Ornella has become so committed to Timor-Leste and young people’s education, our young children, and has made an effort in Timor-Leste and Australia to build this English language school in Same,” Ramos-Horta says of the charity worker on whom he bestowed the Order of Timor-Leste last year.
It hasn’t been without its challenges, of course, infrastructure and politics included. She constantly has to prove that her methods achieve results and aren’t just the pipe dream of another well-intentioned Australian.
Ornella Byak received the Medal of Order of Timor-Leste for her services to education.
The school currently operates out of a church-donated building that BETTER renovated and adapted for purpose. It provides two nutritious meals a day for 101 students in four classrooms, where lessons are taught in Tetum and English and where they also learn Portuguese. Byak’s progress report says it has already achieved an average attendance of 93 per cent, compared with the census figure of 36 per cent for six-year-olds across the country.
She draws strength from the children, their smiles and accomplishments. They and the staff are her new family and friends whom she watches over like a mother-hen, even driving them back after monthly staff parties at her house. “I just want them to relax. Most don’t have cars, some have motorbikes, I don’t want them to drive.” So she takes them home late, and waits until they go inside.
“If they’re out, I wait up for their text messages, or they get a call from me.”
She is hoping to make a contribution to the parents’ education too. The school offers English classes to adults and holiday homework is also designed with them in mind.
Byak, who sleeps an average of four or five hours a night, says she “thinks differently”. She has mentors, two or three at a time, to learn how to be a good chief executive in a hurry.
“I don’t think in a box. I don’t believe there is a box. I look for different ways to solve problems, particularly in a developing context. I need lots of different perspectives and different approaches.
“My thinking is very different and challenging. I have aspirations ... I don’t just want to look at one school. I want to roll it out to the entire country.”
Does Byak ever relax? The question is met with laughter.
It takes her a minute to find the answer. “I watch reality TV so I can escape to someone else’s world and not mine. It turns my brain off for a bit. And I drive around the country a lot.
“So, no, not much.” More laughs.
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