Women-Led Trekking Company Challenges Social Norms In Nepal

In Nepal, a social enterprise is employing a for-profit and nonprofit hybrid model to finance the country’s first and only women-led trekking agency. 

Note, Nepal is ranked as one of the worst countries to be a female, and sits on the bottom of the Human Development Index, which measures for quality of life and the chance to improve one’s socio-economic status. Hence, to have a women-centric business, financed and led by women, is no small feat.

In the 1990s, three sisters, Lucky, Dicky and Nicy, from Darjeeling, India relocated to Pokhara in Nepal to start a guesthouse for visitors.  Quickly they learned that only Nepalese men were taking foreigners into the Himalayas on treks.  This posed a challenge for female travelers — and even some allegations of abuse surfaced. So the trio started Three Sisters Adventure Trekking where women would lead other women on treks in Nepal.

Instead of just running a business that pairs up foreigners with female Nepali guides, they also set up a non-profit called Empowering Women of Nepal, or EWN. The non-profit provides six months of free training to Nepali women interested in learning about mountaineering and the outdoors. To date more than 2,000 women from around the country have done the training program and many have continued on to become guides for the for-profit trekking business.

“Whether or not these women go on to become a guide, we feel it is a seed planted for them and future generations. We demonstrate that women are mentally, physically and emotionally as strong as men,” Lucky says.

Read the full story on Forbes.com.

Visionaries Giving Sight

The world has around 40m blind people, around 90% of them in the developing world. Much of this blindness treatable. “Second Suns”, a new book by David Oliver Relin, tells the story of two ophthalmologists who are working to rid the world of preventable blindness. In 1995 Dr Geoff Tabin and Dr Sanduk Ruit founded the Himalayan Cataract Project, which began as a small outpatient clinic in Kathmandu. It has since spread throughout the Himalayas and across Sub-Saharan Africa, providing education and training for local eye-care professionals, and has overseen around 500,000 low-cost, high-quality cataract surgeries.

These two doctors seem an odd pairing at first—Dr Ruit grew up in a Nepali village where the closest doctor was a six-mile hike away; Dr Tabin is an American from Colorado with a love of mountaineering. Relin spent two years shadowing the pair’s work, chronicling their productive partnership and easy friendship.

Yet the book’s publication has not been painless. The author committed suicide in late 2012, following allegations of inaccuracies in his previous book, “Three Cups of Tea”, co-written with Greg Mortenson. Both Dr Tabin and Dr Ruit were saddened by Relin’s untimely death, and remember him as a caring, honest man and serious journalist.

Dr Tabin and Dr Ruit spoke to The Economist about the challenges of their health-care project, and their vision for its future.

For the full story, please go to Economist.com

Everest: 60 years Later – Do We Still Need to Conquer the Mountain?

(Photo: Esha Chhabra) 

Once you see the Himalayas, you’re hooked.

The sheer immensity of nature is awe-inspiring, to say the least.  It also puts a lot in perspective, including my miniature 5’8” (1.5 m) frame against the backdrop of peaks at 7,000 meters plus.  Here, however, nature will always win.  The odds are well against us.

At the base of these beauties, the nature is foreboding, majestic, and spiritual.  Perhaps, it’s also where they’re located, wedged between Bhutan, India, Nepal, China, and Pakistan, that makes them so exotic and intangible.

But 60 years ago, Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander, decided to challenge nature.  With a local climber, Tenzing Norgay, and a team of more than 360 porters, 20 sherpa guides, a dozen climbers, and 18 tons of food and equipment, he was able to climb the tallest of the Himalayas.

And they succeeded: Norgay has been photographed at the summit of Everest holding the flags of the UN, the UK, Nepal and India.  They climbed 8,848 meters together – a feat of humankind and of friendship.

A sign of power, heroism, and aspiration, some have dismissed the efforts of mountaineers to reach the summit of Mt. Everest as simply selfish. And the 60th anniversary has sparked a debate about our relationship with nature – should we let it be or should we continue to fight it? But, as humans we want to dominate, we want to challenge ourselves, and we continue to leave our mark in the most remote places.

Images have surfaced in National Geographic of a line of mountaineers crowding the route up, leaving behind waste, tools, and trash.  The Indian and Nepali army reportedly removed more than 4 tons of rubbish from the mountain – just this season. Other local mindful mountaineers have begun the Eco Everest Expedition, which cleans up trash from base camp to the summit.  They’ve gathered 13 tons of garbage.  That includes frozen human waste.  As we’ve learned, nothing really decays up there.  They’ve also discovered frozen corpses of unsuccessful missions.

It has become such a popular quest that the Nepali government will have to reassess their system.  Should they grant everyone access – everyone who can pay the $10,000 permit to try the ascent?  Should they distinguish between those truly skilled and physically fit to those simply trying to defy the odds? And have the local Nepali people truly benefitted from this tourism?  There are no simple answers -especially when you’re working with government officials.

It gets better.  Now, there is talk of putting a ladder at the final steps of the ascent.  Referred to as the Hillary Step (after Edmund Hillary), it’s a sheer vertical killer of 40 ft. of rock at 29,000 ft.  It’s a bit inconvenient.  So why not add a ladder to the mountain?

Yes, the anniversary of man’s first successful ascent up Mt. Everest should be celebrated.  It was a climatic moment – literally.  But it was also the beginning of a wave of tourism that is questionable.  We share an odd relation with nature – we admire it, yet we also harm it.  So, why not use this anniversary as a turning point?

Why not admire its beauty from afar, from the base.  Why not live in harmony.  Why not simply have respect, and not the greed to dominate.

Edmund Hillary passed away in 2008.  The mountain still remains.  That will be the story for all of us.

Given the other reports of shrinking glaciers in the Himalayas, the result of climate change and greater pollution, why not we celebrate the beauty of the mountain by letting it breathe freely.

After all, we can’t breathe up there for very long.  So, let it breathe – free of our waste and our invasion.

This originally ran in the Ventura County Star.