Tag Archives: ethnicity

Photo by Stephanie Lowe

Rough Guides: Sherpas for Hire in the Himalayas

Best of In The Fray 2013. Each spring, hundreds of foreigners converge on Mount Everest, hoping to conquer the world’s highest peak. With them come jobs for Sherpa guides, porters, and guesthouse workers—and lethal risks for those stuck on the mountain’s crowded slopes.

UPDATE, April 18, 2014: The worst accident in the history of Mount Everest occurred today, when an avalanche swept across the Khumbu Icefall and killed twelve Sherpas.

Ever since 1953, when Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, many more have aspired to follow them to the top of the world. Every year, hundreds of foreign adventurers climb Everest—at 29,029 feet, Earth’s highest peak—each paying tens of thousands of dollars for the opportunity.

For these tourists, conquering Everest is often a lifelong ambition. But for their local guides and porters, it is a mere job—albeit a dangerous and well-compensated one. A porter carrying goods to the Everest base camp on Nepal’s border makes an average of nine dollars a day, more than three times the daily wage of a typical worker in Nepal. High-altitude workers can earn much more: hiring a Sherpa to climb with you costs $5,000 to $7,000, plus tips and bonuses.

And yet few workplaces boast as high a mortality rate. Just last year, eleven people died attempting to scale Everest—the largest death toll since 1996, the mountain’s deadliest year, when over two days alone a blizzard led to the deaths of nine climbers (a disaster documented by Jon Krakauer in his book Into Thin Air).

The photographs above document my travels last summer through the mountains of Nepal. I began my journey in the northeastern district where Everest is located, Solukhumbu. Later, I spent several weeks with a team of Nepalese mountain guides training in Kakani, one hour north of Kathmandu. In exploring the trails and talking with numerous guides who have worked the Himalayan peaks, I gained a sense of the ambivalence that locals have about the growing international popularity of Everest, which in recent years has brought them rising shares of both bounty and danger.

One of over 120 ethnic groups in Solukhumbu, the Sherpa ethnic group has come to control the tourism and mountaineering industry in the district, and their name has become synonymous with the trained personnel who help foreigners up the slopes (Norgay, a Nepalese Sherpa, paired up with the New Zealand mountaineer Hillary on Everest’s first successful ascent). For some Sherpas, the work they do above the clouds is a calling. “Some people like to drink; some people like to climb mountains,” says Indra Rai, a Nepalese mountain guide in his mid-twenties. “I like the mountains.”

A Nepalese porter takes a wooden door up to the Everest base camp.
A Nepalese porter takes a wooden door up to the Everest base camp.

Everest is not for amateurs. Foreigners who seek to scale it from the south must first make a two-week trek to the base camp and then spend six to eight weeks acclimating their bodies to the thin mountain air before the five-day climb to the peak can even begin. But as grueling as the journey is for Everest’s newcomers, the veterans who lead them skyward have a much more challenging task: setting up fixed lines and ascenders—secured ropes, and the metal devices that clamp onto those ropes, which climbers use to hoist themselves up the mountain.

“We climb twice,” says Chhiring Dorje Sherpa, a Nepalese mountain guide in his early thirties. (The ethnic group’s name is also used as a surname in Nepalese culture.) “First, we go up to set the ropes and camps, then we go down to collect our clients and take them to the top.” Often, those fixing the ropes are not just Nepalese Sherpas, but mixed teams of Nepalese and Pakistani guides—working together in spite of the language barrier.

The demand for these mountain men (and women—Sherpas are known to be relatively respectful of gender equality) is increasing. On May 23, 2010, there were more successful ascents of Mount Everest—169—than had occurred in the three decades since Hillary and Norgay first reached the peak. The influx of climbers in recent years has been a boon to Solukhumbu’s economy. Foreigners do not simply employ Sherpas on the mountaintops; they also stay at the family-owned guesthouses scattered along the path to Everest.

Pasang Karesh, forty-five, owns one such guesthouse in Gorak Shep, the Nepalese town closest to Everest’s southern base camp. He speaks of how the tourist boom has transformed the area: the trails are becoming more commercialized, he says, with the outsider-driven demand for accommodations and food supplies spurring gentrification. The recent changes include the construction of a mobile tower in Gorak Shep several years ago—explicitly built to cater to those on the mountaintops who wanted an alternative to costly satellite phones.

As more people from around the world muster the resources (and recklessness) to scale the world’s tallest peak, Everest has itself become commercialized. Privileged Westerners come by the droves to “climb for a cause”—from child poverty to water conservation. Scaling the peak has become just another goal for some to check off on their life’s bucket list.

More worrisome, the mountain’s slopes have become crowded, a situation that veteran mountaineers deplore as dangerous. More than 200 people have died on Everest, and even though fatalities happen less frequently these days, the recent surge in climbers has meant that more than a quarter of those deaths have occurred since 2000. There is a very narrow window between May and June when Everest’s slopes are relatively less perilous, and during that time hundreds of climbers can crowd the so-called “Death Zone”—altitudes above 26,000 feet, where oxygen becomes scarce and mental faculties quickly deteriorate. (Climate change may also be making the climb more lethal, as the mountain’s layers of ice and snow melt and leave the path rockier and more treacherous.)

Last year, an expedition went up Everest to clear debris and retrieve the abandoned corpses of previous climbers. The five-person team ended up having to wait four hours in the Death Zone, as climbers going up “Hillary’s Step”—a sheer rock wall just below the summit—jammed the path down. A South Korean climber died, one of Everest’s four fatalities that day.

Nima Sherpa, a twenty-nine-year-old medic, ticks off the many afflictions that beset those who venture into Everest’s unrivaled altitudes: frostbite, snow blindness, hypothermia, delirium. The Sherpa guides who risk their lives climbing the Himalayas’ toughest peaks cannot dwell on these dangers, though: they have families to support. “The pay is good, and this is their work,” he points out.

And yet that is, perhaps, part of the problem. “When your family needs that money,” another guide says, “sometimes you don’t insist a weak climber turn back.”

Stephanie Lowe is an adventurer and storyteller. She is the founder of Playfull Productions, a firm dedicated to educating and empowering through play.

 

A Cross-cultural Movement Emerges

Graffiti of American flag and people with the word 'Diversity'
Photo by Seth Anderson

Hazleton, Pennsylvania, is a small city (population: 25,000) that once boasted a thriving coal mining industry, but today has an unemployment rate double the national one. It’s best known now as the first American city to pass a law designed to get rid of undocumented immigrants by making their lives exceedingly difficult. Hazleton approved the measure — which prevents illegal immigrants from working or renting homes there — in 2006, four years before Arizona passed its similar “papers, please” law.

On the surface, it seems that little has changed in Hazleton since the law was enacted: the New York Times summed up the situation there last spring with its headline, “New Attitude on Immigration Skips an Old Coal Town.” But there are some folks working hard to make change happen. Their leader happens to be the manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, Joe Maddon.

Maddon grew up in Hazleton, in a time when most of its residents were white ethnics, predominantly Italian and Polish Americans. Since then, the city’s demographics have changed radically. According to census data, the percentage of Latino residents has surged, rising from 5 percent in 2000 to 37 percent in 2010.

In 2008, Maddon’s cousin, Elaine Maddon Curry, helped create Concerned Parents, an organization that provides services to immigrant families in Hazleton. But as the backlash against the city’s Latino population grew, Maddon found himself frustrated by all the anti-immigrant sentiment. He came to believe that Hazleton’s immigrants, and the city itself, needed more than services. It needed to build bridges between immigrants and the native-born, whites and Latinos. It needed a real and shared sense of community.

“We’re the same, just speak a different language,” Maddon says. “The Slovak, the Polish, the Irish, the Italians — we all started the same.”

In 2010, Maddon decided “to do something to repair what has been damaged here,” and since then has joined with his cousin and other like-minded residents of his hometown to establish the Hazleton Integration Project. As part of its first messaging campaign, the group plans to set up billboards throughout Hazleton with photos of city residents of many different ethnic backgrounds, all with the same tagline: “We are from Hazleton.”

The Hazleton ONE Community Center, set to open this summer, will serve as the project’s headquarters. Besides hosting the Concerned Parents group and providing homework help and athletic facilities, the center will offer Spanish-language classes, host cultural events, and sponsor other programs designed to bring together the city’s native-born whites and (mostly) immigrant Latinos. As Bob Curry, the president of the project’s board, describes it:

Yes, we will provide particular services. But the larger mission of integration will guide us everything we do. Services are one thing. Integration is quite another.… It’s a longer-range goal.

The group’s leadership includes both whites and Latinos. Eugenio Sosa, the executive director and himself an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, explains their approach:

This is following our dream…. We are starting with the children because, you know, children do not have prejudice. They are going to be spending time together, playing together, learning together, going to each others’ houses, learning about different cultures, how different people celebrate. It is just a great opportunity.

I learned about the Hazleton Integration Project through an organization called One Nation Indivisible (disclosure: I have donated to this group), whose purpose is to “support and celebrate” efforts at inclusion and integration, in particular those focused on immigrants to this country. Their definition of integration describes exactly what is going on in Hazleton.

Integration refers not merely to the absence of physical segregation. It is an aspiration best imagined by Martin Luther King. “Desegregation,” King wrote, could be accomplished by laws, but “integration,” acknowledges a web of mutuality — a shared fate. Integration is not synonymous with “desegregation” and “diversity.” Integration requires a full acceptance, a richer coming together, a willful expansion of community circles.  Our project tells many stories about what advocates call “immigrant integration.” Used in this context, “integration” does not necessarily refer to the absence of physical segregation, but to a wide variety of practices, policies, and programs that respect, welcome, and fully incorporate immigrants into the communities where they live.

Joe Maddon and his colleagues at the Hazleton Integration Project are working at a grassroots level to improve their city and overcome its ethnic divides. I can’t think of worthier goals.

Correction, June 18, 2013: This blog post originally misidentified the cofounder of Concerned Parents. It is Elaine Maddon Curry, not Joe Maddon. The text has been edited to reflect this.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Twitter: @IanReifowitz