“Wasfia makes us touch the sky; she makes us take leaps of faith. She is why little girls continue to dream.”
— Munize Manzur, Principal, Sunbeams School, Bangladesh
“This isn’t just some restless voyager who needs a thrill every season. This is the purposeful traveller who carries causes in her backpack, this is the nose-pierced rebel who cuts away at the stifling threads of convention. This is a story of a Bangladeshi, but it is more than a Bangladesh story. It is the story of Wasfia Nazreen screaming at the world: Women can do anything.”
– The Straits Times Editorial
A CHAT WITH NAZREEN: Parts of this article are based on excerpts taken from Wasfia Nazreen’s interviews with National Geographic and press conferences in Bangladesh.
Wasfia Nazreen is the first Bengali in the world and the only Bangladeshi ever to climb K2 and the Seven Summits or, the highest mountains of every continent. She climbed Mount Everest on 26 May 2012, as the second woman from Bangladesh. This celebrated mountaineer became the first climber from Bangladesh to scale Pakistan’s notorious K2 summit, the world’s most dangerous climb and second-highest mountain. The K2 is considered far more technically difficult to scale than Everest and has only been scaled by 425 people since 1954 — including around 20 women and Wasfia added her name to the list of success on 22 July 2022.
WHO IS WASFIA NAZREEN?
Wasfia Nazreen is the founder of Osel Foundation, which empowers marginalized girls from Bangladesh and Nepal through the outdoors. The award-winning short film called Wasfia, produced by Apple Inc., can be seen at wasfianazreen.com or National Geographic.
Wasfia is concurrently serving as an adventurer, mountaineer, photographer, educator, researcher, and humanitarian. She is the only female to hold the simultaneous titles of National Geographic Explorer & Adventurer. As an Expedition Expert for National Geographic, and in her own capacity, she takes leaders on journeys into nature to connect with themselves, humanity and the earth so that together we can commit to solutions that will create positive change for our planet.
As an outspoken activist since her late teens, Wasfia has risked everything for the causes she believes in. Men’s Journal named her as one of the 25 most adventurous women of the past 25 years and Outside Magazine recognized her as one of 40 women in the last 40 years who have advanced and challenged the outdoor world through their leadership, innovation, and athletic feats.
WHAT DRIVES WASFIA?
Wasfia Nazreen’s goal reaches far beyond summits, routes, and firsts. Her passion is fuelled by causes close to her heart. She says, “I chose to climb the seven summits of the world for a number of reasons. Symbolically, it was about taking the Bangladeshi flag to every continental summit, and of course the physical challenge.”
In a press conference after her climbing K2- the mountain that ‘tries to kill you’- Wasfia had a different perspective about the requirements to make it to the top, “When I am asked [about] how hard it was to climb these mountains, I always say that getting to the base camp of each of these mountains was harder socially than the actual physical act of climbing.” She elaborated on how people strain over the physical hardship behind getting to the top of the mountain, but she believes 90% of the training is psychological and concentrates more on the daily struggle a woman faces, especially in a conservative South Asian household.
After successfully climbing the seven summits, she aimed to utilize her social capital to garner support for women’s rights in Bangladesh. With that vision, Osel Foundation was initiated The foundation takes marginalized girls back to nature to empower them to climb their inner mountains symbolically to reinstall their institution of decision-making for themselves.
WASFIA’S ABCs
Wasfia worked in Tibet on a four-year campaign to protest the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. During that time, she traveled extensively throughout Tibet and Nepal, organizing protests against human rights violations by the Chinese government. For traversing said mountainous regions, Wasfia underwent basic climbing training. She started with climbing bridges and towers; in 2006, she was testing out small climbs, and by 2007, she was taking on six- and seven-thousand-meter peaks.
In 2010, she was involved in the international humanitarian aid group CARE’s project in Bangladesh that had rescued 3,000 women and children from brothels. CARE was in the middle of educating and training them for alternate career paths in order to reintegrate them into mainstream society when unfortunately, the funding for the project dried up. CARE had to leave. Nazreen watched as the 3,000 women and children were left in social limbo, ostracized by the greater Bangladeshi society but also removed from the remaining social support the brothels had afforded them.
Nazreen felt it was high time Bangladeshi people had access to aid organizations not headed by foreigners. She decided to combine her two passions—activism and climbing. She sold some family jewelry, took out tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and set off to work.
HULA-HOOPING HER WAY THROUGH!
First, Nazreen created ‘Bangladesh on Seven Summits foundation’ to supervise the climbing bit and started flying from one peak to the next with her red and green in hand. The 40th anniversary of Bangladeshi independence was in 2011. Nazreen added her unique spice to the mix 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 younger Nazreen had been banned from.
“When I was a little girl, one of my core childhood memories was of this foreign couple visiting my town. Their daughter had this hula-hoop. I was trying to play with it, but a neighborhood woman said in a derogatory tone, ‘Girls shouldn’t be shaking their hips.’ Younger me thought, ‘Oh, good girls can’t play with hula-hoops.’ This simple right to play as a little girl was taken from me. And it happened repeatedly. I was told I couldn’t bike because it would take my virginity and so much other nonsense. Today I’m doing this for myself and for the little girls back at home. It’s my little way of saying, ‘No more.’”
When Nazreen summited Everest, she garnered attention from the international media, which she utilized to expedite the second phase of her project.
ÖSEL FOUNDATION TAKES OFF!
With six of the seven climbs behind her, Nazreen launched the Ösel Foundation aimed at educating marginalized young women and expanding their mobility outdoors. The term ‘ösel’ in Tibetan literally means “clear [sel] light [ö],” it stands for luminosity or clarity.
“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 began its education and outdoor initiatives with a six-month pilot program for 50 teenage girls,” says Nazreen, “We are trying to change our society. This seemed like a good place to start.”
SWIMMING AGAINST THE CURRENT
“I refuse to live by society’s standards and expectations of me.” – Wasfia N.
Wasfia was asked how the response to her international feats representing Bangladesh has been, and about any backlashes she may have faced. “The response was positive. Well, for the most part.” Wasfia replies. “There was a celebration at the prime minister’s place. And this highly decorated colonel in the Bangladeshi army or navy came in and screamed, ‘This thing(!) got up, and our army couldn’t get up.’ He was screaming at his people, his men. He couldn’t even call me ‘she’. He just said ‘thing.’”
However, Wasfia is far from taking a hit from their taunts. Instead, she sees progress from that army colonel to fathers who approach her to see if their daughters can be a part of her foundation. “I don’t want the fame, but the fact that some men are starting to see that they can get their daughters involved in sports and the outdoors, that’s a matter of pride (for me). Seeing that social shift is huge for me. There aren’t many positive stories in Bangladesh. This is one of them,” she says.
“Throughout history, we usually see men accomplish things before women get the opportunity to. However, Bangladesh has stood out as the odd example in the field of mountaineering,” Wasfia says, referring to herself, “where a woman has accomplished it before a man could.” she recalls that in the beginning, there were some roadblocks caused by people in Bangladesh who were obsessed with wanting a Bangladeshi man to be the first person to complete the seven summits record. “In the long run, it’s flattering. The men in our country and their entitlement— I think my achievements hit some of their egos.”
GENERATION EQUALITY FOR UNWOMEN
“Women can often be as much a part of the patriarchy [as men are]. I’ve had women executives tell me that we simply aren’t ready for equality, such as receiving equal pay. I disagree; change will only come when we put our foot down,” Wasfia says at UN.
“I’ve had CEOs of companies telling me during meetings that after I finished climbing the seven summits, it would be time for me to climb my eighth summit: marriage. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve accomplished as a woman; your biggest achievement still seems to be summed up by your marital status.”
REPRESENTATION MATTERS
Wasfia believes her field to have a predominantly white, Western male perspective because she noticed that in the top network channels, there is no leading adventure or exploration show where women represent themselves and tell their own stories. “This lack of representation is what inspired me to get involved, learn about representation in mass media and why it matters. That’s why I’m now producing two different shows and a film about inspiring female explorers in seven continents,” says Wasfia. “In my adolescence and in my own life, I was marginalized. So representation feels like healing. I don’t want any other girl to go through that. That’s where the power comes from.”
The way Wasfia transformed her tragic beginning in life and tumultuous youth into a life built on fierce independence and unyielding drive is a testament to womanhood and the divine feminine energy. On women’s history month, we are proud to speak of this woman who not only embodies mountaineering, guiding, storytelling, activism, and educating but also the Wasfia who chose to look fear and uncertainty square in the eye and kept climbing for her country and her girls back home.
Wasfia Nazreen is currently working on her memoir and two film projects based out of Los Angeles.