“Forget every step, every breath you take is an effort at such high altitudes,” - this was Sabriye Tenberken, founder of ‘kanthari’ at Vellayani here, reminiscing about the amazing expedition that she undertook with six Tibetan students to a peak in the shadow of Everest, way back in 2004.
What made the trek remarkable was not just the fact that Sabriye herself was blind, but even the six Tibetan teenagers were blind too. ‘’There were many who kept asking us why we took the blind children to the mountains. And I said, for the blind, it is only as dangerous as crossing a city street,’’ recollected Sabriye, who dislikes boundaries being drawn for people with disabilities.
The organisation that Sabriye runs along with her partner Paul Kronenberg, ‘kanthari’, runs on a similar philosophy and is aimed to create social visionaries out of people, generally considered disabled or marginalised. Before establishing kanthari, Sabriye had initiated ‘Braille Without Borders’, a school for Blind in Tibet, and the six teenagers who climbed with her were all her students of the school.
The teenagers belonged to the 14-19 age group. ‘’We had several training sessions, rock climbing and acclimatisation training for a long time. We went trekking for a month through high altitude areas, before actually taking out the expedition,’’ said Sabriye.
The team of Kyila, Gyendsen, Tenzin, Dachung, Tashi Pasang and Bungzo, along with Sabriye, Paul, the famed blind Everest climber Erik Weihenmayer and American guides started from Lhasa, trekked to the Everest base camp from the north side, the Tibetan side. They trekked their way to the Everest Base Camp at about 5,300 metres and then climbed all the way up to the Advanced Base Camp at 6,500 metres.
Their destination was Lhagpa-Ri (Stormy mountain) at 7,300 metres. The whole expedition took them over a month, because unlike the Nepal side of the Everest, the Tibet side had no porters who would carry luggage for the climbers and yaks for carrying load were available only from the Everest Base Camp. And all the way, their climb was filmed by a Hollywood film crew.
They were almost at the top, with just about 300 metres left to go, when a huge snowstorm broke out, that went on for days together. ‘’We waited for days and nights, but there was no respite. We hardly had any food left, hardly any gas and the yaks were not able to reach us,’’ recalled Sabriye.
The kids were doing relatively fine health-wise, but many of the team, including film crew members, developed major health problems and Paul developed brain oedema - the mountains not making no difference between the sighted and sightless.
It was after five days of waiting that they decided to climb down. ‘’For the Americans, it was more important to reach the top. But for us, it was to gather impressions, experience the mountains, making friends while we trekked, sharing. It was a whole lot of different philosophies at work there,’’ recollected Sabriye.
For the children, the most beautiful experience was feeling the ice hanging down in glacier caves. They played around with the ice that hung down the cave roofs and the ice crystals that grew up from the cave floor, as long as time permitted. Some of them still want to go back and attempt climbing the peaks again.
But not Sabriye. She is disgusted by the lack of social responsibility of the climbers. ‘’They throw so much of waste on the mountains. People don’t bring back what they carry up,’’ said Sabriye, who loves horse-back riding and whitewater kayaking. ‘’But it did teach me about experiencing nature in very intensive surroundings,’’ she added.
It had all started with Sabriye inviting Erik Weihenmayer, the blind mountaineer who scaled Everest, to give a talk for her students at the school for the blind in Tibet. ‘’And he said, I want to do much more than just talk. We talked and we discussed and we finally decided to attempt this,’’ said Sabriye. Of the teenagers who went up the mountains with Sabriye, Kyila is now running an integrated kindergarten for sighted and sightless children in Tibet, Gyendsen runs a braille printing house and library, Tenzin is the owner of a restaurant and two massage parlours, Tashi works along with Tenzin, Bungzo, who wanted to study Law, is one of the first students in Tibet to attend a University and Dachung runs a clothing shop.
The film made on this expedition, ‘Blindsight’, directed by Lucy Walker and produced by Sybil Robson, got rave reviews all across the world and was premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006.
