A Bangladeshi aid worker hula-hoops on the Seven Summits to empower her country’s women and girls. She has been selected one of the National Geographic’s adventurers of the World for 2014/15
While exact numbers are difficult to pin down, approximately 350 people have climbed the Seven Summits. If activist Wasfia Nazreen summits Oceania’s Carstensz Pyramid in late November, it won’t rank as a stunning mountaineering feat—ascending to the continents’ high points isn’t as revered as other more daunting mountaineering feats. Certainly, she may become the first to hula-hoop on all seven, but Nazreen’s goal reaches far beyond summits, routes, and firsts.In 2010, Nazreen was working for international humanitarian aid group CARE in her native country of Bangladesh. One of CARE’s projects pulled 3,000 women and children out of brothels and began educating and training them for careers outside the sex industry. Bangladesh is the eighth most populous country, with just under a third of its people living below the international poverty line. Then the funding for the project dried up. Unable to win a grant to continue the program, CARE left and Nazreen watched as the 3,000 women and children were left in social limbo, ostracized by Bangladeshi society and removed from what little social support the brothels had afforded them, according to Nazreen.
“Worse yet were the kids. They had almost escaped the cyclical nature of the brothel life,” says 32-year-old Nazreen, who has worked in the human rights field since her early 20s, after graduating from Agnes Scott College. “We were so dependent on these foreign organizations. If [an NGO] left, it was almost like a program just ended.”
Nazreen decided that while foreign support had its role in the developing nation, it was time for the Bangladeshi people to begin building aid organizations that were not headed by foreigners. She had begun mountaineering in 2006, while working in Tibet to stem human rights violations by the Chinese government. She decided to combine her two passions—activism and climbing.
Nazreen sold some family jewelry, took out tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and went to work. First, she created the Bangladesh on Seven Summits foundation to oversee the climbing portion of her mission and began ticking off the peaks with a Bangladeshi flag in hand. At that point no Bangladeshi had completed the Seven Summits. The 40th anniversary of Bangladeshi independence was in 2011, and the country was hungry to celebrate. Nazreen added her own unique flourish by packing a 2.5-pound, collapsible Hula-Hoop in the Bengali colors and breaking it out on top of each summit. Hula-hooping was something she had been forbidden to do as a child. When Nazreen summited Everest, international media began picking up her story, which she used to generate momentum into the second phase of her project.
“Eighty percent of the people haven’t seen a mountain,” says Nazreen of her country, which is known for its flat, fertile river deltas. “Going to every continent took the Bangladeshi people to every continent. It gave them a lot of pride.”
This fall, with six of the seven climbs behind her, Nazreen implemented the second stage of her project. She launched the Ösel Foundation, aimed at educating marginalized young women and getting them into the outdoors. Bangladesh is a deeply patriarchal society in which even educated girls are discouraged from participating in sports, and arranged marriages are commonplace. Women who have been born into the sex trade or victimized by rape enjoy a fraction of the rights that others do. This January, the Ösel Foundation begins its education and outdoor initiatives with a six-month pilot program for 50 teenage girls. The curriculum is influenced by Western outdoor education programs.
“We are trying to change our society,” says Nazreen. “This seemed like a good place to start.”
