She Summited Each Continent’s Highest Mountain To Empower Women | Nat Geo Live

I work for the women in my country who are facing crazy mountains without even having to step on a mountain. And I thought of a campaign to go climb the highest mountain of every continent in the world, knowing that the struggle in the mountain was so parallel to the struggle that women face in society. (audience clapping)

I like to get outside and climb things. Mainly mountains, but when I was little the climbing scene was very different. I was about six or seven, and I was living in this part of Bangladesh, called Khulna, which is very near The Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world that you may have heard of.

And this is the first time when I saw white people, when my father's office received these foreigners, and I didn't know how to speak English at that time. I was overly excited, the officer had a little girl who had a very nice, ring-like thing around her that she was playing with; later on, I found out it was a hula hoop, many years later. So I wanted to be cool, I wanted to fit in, and I was obviously very excited, and I started playing with it, with her, in sign language, whatever.

And this auntie, we have a lot of aunties in our society who dictate things for us, snapped at me and said (yelling in Bangla). Which is so derogatory in Bangla that it cannot even be translated in English, but what it sums up is that "a good girl" shouldn't be shaking their hips. (crowd laughter) And I wanted to be a good girl, and I kept down the hula and I never played with it. I was also asked to stop biking, cycling, because I would lose my virginity. And there are many other taboos that I believed.

Bangladesh, it's a land of extremities. Light, and darkness. It's a nation of 170 million people approaching. We don't have many mountains as you can see. We don't have any mountains, we live in water. But when I was a child, some amazing, crazy disastrous events happened in my life.

I lost my home even before I was a teenager. My parents divorced and there was a custody battle, and I was homeless as a result. Very early on, I had to, as a child, become an adult, take responsibility of basically my existence. But it was these experiences that I'm very grateful for. These mountains that I climbed, because those are the experiences that made me pursue a better education.

I went on to pursue another career fighting for other people's homes. Whether that was for women who were severely abused, or ostracized, or for indigenous people living under crazy regimes, or refugees without a nation. And it was my one particular friendship and connection that got me into a lot of trouble. Not just in China or Tibet, but at home in Bangladesh.

As an activist who was working and was very involved with human rights work in Tibet, my distant relatives, colleagues, my tribe, basically, in Bangladesh, were being hounded by intelligence forces in Bangladesh all the time, for years. My family was basically very ashamed of me, but it was during this period when I found the mountains as a refuge to heal myself.

But also, it was during this time that I really understood the definition of what home means. And I ask myself, "What is it about Bangladesh that really inspires me? That I feel proud of?" And it was the women who were in the forefront of every movement, whether it was our liberation movement, our independence movement, or other movements; women were what defined Bangladesh.

So as Bangladesh approached 40 years in 2011, there were all kinds of celebration being planned, and I thought of a campaign to go climb the highest mountain of every continent in the world, because I thought symbolically it was taking Bangladesh to all corners of the globe. And also personally, just knowing that the struggle in the mountain was so parallel to the struggle that women face in society.

So The Seven Summits was first postulated by a Canadian mountaineer, Patrick Morrow, in the early 80s, and after he finished in 1996, almost hundreds of people have accomplished it. But out of that, only 32 to 35 were women, mostly Westerners. When I first thought of this, I obviously didn't have the monetary funds.

I ended up convincing the board of two different banks to give me bank loans totally based on trust. This magical thing started happening; all these guardian angels, and just people who wanted to help out in their small ways, started reaching out. A rich woman who recently got out of a relationship, and you get talaq money, which is a divorce sum that you get from your husband, she gave that all to me and said, "Please go free my soul on the summit."

I was like "wow!" And I was so inspired, and then I got an email from my former colleague in the Tibetan movement, Nima Dorje, who says, "Oh, by the way, Patrick Morrow lives just by me, do you wanna hook up with him?" So I write to him, and Patrick and Baiba, his wife, invite me to Canada to train with them.

He set this really hardcore regime for me, and then he connected me to different people in the seven continents, which made things easier. But mind you, Bangladesh doesn't have a diplomatic relationship with almost the majority of these places, so going to a lot of these places was just huge logistical barriers. But I ended up finishing five of the seven summits in the next one and a half years, including Chomolungma, or Mount Everest.

I was so inspired; it was personally very healing for me. It was a brutally lonely journey, to say the least. But in the last four years, I've gone through every extreme situation, from eating my own (bleep), and poisoning myself because my camp got totally destroyed, and my toilet got mixed with my food, to getting held captive in Papua, and held for ransom, to losing my best friends.

I lost four of my best friends in the last five years, waking up to earthquakes and having everything that you knew being lost, to getting frostbites and ending up with medical bills in a country like the states without medical insurance, and going through intense physical pain. But this whole journey gave me a vantage point to see the earth from a perspective that one out of 170 million in my country has been able to see.

So I'm very grateful, and I learned a lot. I got to reflect a lot on the human experience, nothing will ever be the same for me. I took, as you can see, a bunch of selfies, which is a pure indicator of how lonely you are. (crowd laughter) This is the time when I was stuck in the infamous Hillary Step in a traffic jam, and I thought traffic jams only existed in Bangladesh. (crowd laughter)

But whenever I would hit rock bottom, I would remind myself of the women at home, and the struggles that they would go through, and that would hug me with a newfound energy, and I finally managed in 2015 to accomplish a feat, which by default made me the first Bangladeshi; that was not my goal. Remember that hula? (crowd laughter)

I took this hula hoop to The Seven Summits. I have a waist now and I can shake it, but it was not about that; it was about reclaiming back what was taken away from me as a girl child, and I want to make that possible for every other girl that exists in my country, and in my region.

The other transformation that happened is when I came down Everest, everyone who detested me came back in my life. Family members, politicians who sent intelligence, and that's exactly when I realized, "Wow, climbing mountains solved so many problems in this society?" Had I known that, I would be pursuing this probably a year many moons ago.

And I got all kinds of company offers; banks wanted to pay off the debt by themselves, and I got a lot of marriage proposals. (crowd laughter) Marriage proposals at home come with a biodata, how you would apply in a job.

So I made my own biodata, and because it comes with a mugshot of the groom, and how much they earn, and what their father does, and mother does. So mine looks like this, and every time this works. (crowd laughter)

To sum it up, there are many other girls who need to climb their own mountains. And what I'm doing now is using the momentum of the campaign to gain support towards my foundation, Ösel, and it's an alternate education center, which combines the latest scientific findings about mind-training and combines it with mindfulness and training in nature through various activities.

Ösel is a conscious movement to bring balance to mother nature by empowering women to harness their inner luminosity. Thank you so much. (crowd clapping)