By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS
Kathmandu : After Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa showed that it was possible for man to conquer the world’s highest peak, and hundreds treaded in their illustrious footsteps, charity now begins on a high note – at Mount Everest.
Less than three weeks after a team of Western musicians, singers and mountaineers headed for the base camp of the 8,848-metre-high peak to stage the world’s coolest concert and raise money for a cancer hospital in Nepal, a Bahraini woman is on a marathon trek to the base camp, also to raise funds for social projects.
Maha Mansoor, dean of business studies at the Bahrain Training Institute, is on a nearly fortnight-long trek through forests and glaciers to reach the Everest base camp at a height of almost 5,600 metres.
She is part of a 50-member group that is taking part in the expedition under Gulf4Good, a charity set up in 2001.
The participants have to raise almost Bharaini Dinar 1,600 ($4,200) to support a Child Welfare Scheme in Ilam, Nepal’s tea garden district in the east, and the New Youth Children’s Development Society, an orphanage that is home to nearly 50 children.
The Ilam project was started with money raised by the charity from two earlier treks to the Everest base camp, amounting to around BD 53,000 ($140,000).
Mansoor, a mother of three, will become the first woman from the tiny Gulf island to head for the Everest base camp.
She trained for nine months for the trek by cycling, working with weights and practising kickboxing.
In the past, the charity organised 22 other expeditions that included trekking, cycling and kayaking in China, Egypt, India, Tanzania, Thailand, Nepal, Morocco, Mongolia, Jordan and the UAE.
More than 300 people from 25 countries took part in the earlier expeditions, raising over BD 400,000 for various charity projects.