 I always relate with this coat, which had an impact on me from when I was maybe in my early 20s, because as a member of the 7 billion humans on this planet, I feel very strongly that it's time now, more than ever before, to reinvent how we connect to our spirit and how we connect to nature. And one way to do that is by reinventing how we teach our kids, not just kids as adults. We're losing touch with ourself and the planet and the whole web of life. Every time we turn a wheel in some part of the world, it affects anyone and everyone on the other side. Just to give you a background, I come from Bangladesh, which has been a topic of conversation here in all the climate change panels. Everyone's saying how we're gonna be sinking by 2020, but guess what, we're already half underwater. I grew up, my earliest memory is having to wade out in our living room in boats. There are cows and kettles and snakes and everything going past, chickens flying. This was really hard growing up, but it gave me the vantage point that a lot of people didn't probably have in Western world. We knew by just looking at the sky how to relate on our daily basis to everything. I come from a very conservative part of Bangladesh and like any other South Asian countries, as you may know, girls at a very young age are prepared for the ultimate mountain, which is marriage. Just true. But something very amazing happened. It was life altering when I was 11. My parents abandoned me. They had a long divorce battle and then no one wanted to take custody. And for almost nine months time, I was kind of in the middle of nowhere being shifted from one relative's house to another. But during this time, when I was schoolless, I was homeless, friendless, society was just not taking care of me. My family was not taking care of me. I went back to nature and I found my strength in knowing that everything in nature was changing. And this was my first lesson that I still hold very strong to my core, that everything in this world is impermanent. Nothing, no dictators, no system, everything is impermanent. And I wanna tell a refer to another story around this age, barely six or seven. I didn't know how to speak English at that time and I had these visitors that my father's office brought from Scotland and so I'm seeing white people for the first time. And one of the offices had a little girl company, probably was the daughter. And to me, she looked like a fairy, and she had this ring-like thing that she was playing with. Later on, many years later, I found that it was a hula hoop. I got really excited. I wanted to play with her. I wanted to be friends with her. So when I started playing with her, an auntie, we have a lot of aunties in a South Asian societies who make your decisions for you, decide your marriage and your groom, even when you're 13. So she comes out and she said, my other Komodula no Shubhapaina, which is so derogatory. I don't even know how to translate it in English, but it basically implies that a good girl shouldn't be shaking her hips. I wanted to be a good girl. And I didn't, so I listened to her and I just like the hula hoop incident, I was told that I shouldn't be continuing to cycle because I would lose my virginity. I was told that when you're playing badminton, I was a tomboy and I was really into sports. So when I was playing badminton, you have to focus more on how your scarves are on yourselves rather than focusing on the cork. So all these taboos, right? And so I guess I grew up in a society where I was always told what I could not do rather than what I could do. So I ended up making a career, fighting for human rights and serving those who were homeless, whether they were refugees or girls who were married off and then divorced and coming back to school, or sex workers who were being ostracized, rehabilitating them, working with indigenous populations or different minority groups. And every time I went to the remotest part of Bangladesh, I realized that the strength of the country lied in the women. They were in the forefront of every movement. Their resiliency was something that gave me strength and this is something that we never hear in international media. We never hear, given especially the background that we come from, predominantly being Muslim and patriarchal, like the fights that they have to put through, so I wanted to highlight these stories. Fast forward to 2010, Bangladesh was approaching 40 years in 2011, so there was a lot of celebrations already going on. I went on a winter expedition in Nepal and during this winter expedition, I was supposed to show up back home for a cousin's wedding, all the weddings happened in winter and as you may know, this spent so much money in the wedding I could do, I would probably climb these mountains 50 times with that money, so I wasn't very keen in showing up but luck was in my favor and I got stuck in this part of Nepal where the river froze and I just knew that by the time I came back to Lukla and Kathmandu, I wouldn't make it to the final function. That's when I got a call from my father and this was one of the two calls per year quota and I didn't really have a connection with him and he was really mad that I wasn't gonna show up at this family event who's gonna save his face. I had a very high fever at this time so instead of asking me about my health, the only thing that he asked me is, okay, tell me what I should tell everyone. So I was like, I came up with the story. I knew what my family would accept and I told him and he went and said that to my family and society but this was a turning point for me. I was stuck in this part of Nepal where I sat with myself, I sat in nature and I told myself and I vowed to myself I was never gonna do what was expected of me anymore ever in my life and that I was gonna go for my dream, whatever that was. I already had spent a lot of time working in the Himalayan region by this time, almost 10 years and I worked for a long time with the Tibetans and Nepali Sherpa people who were originally from Tibet and this is when with a lot of my Western climber friends who were in the movement as well, I learned climbing. So this is when I put my climbing and my activism together and launched a campaign in 2011 called Bangladesh on Seven Summits and my main purpose was to highlight to the world how far women, women in Bangladesh have come but also strategically taking the Bangladesh flag to every continent. At the time when I planned this, I had no idea that it was gonna go big. It was just my humble wish to take Bangladesh to all the international podium on a different note. Now mind you with the Bangladeshi passport, most of these places, we don't even have any connection with Latin America. To even get there, to go to Argentina, to go to Antarctica, I had to go by Chile, we have no connection with them. So to get to the mountain was harder than actually climbing the mountain. To fundraise for the mountains was enormous because basically at this time I was still working grassroots activism, working with street kids. I already had student loans and other loans. The first thing I did was sold off the jewelry that my mother had left me for my wedding. When the gold prices went up, we all get traditionally passed on our wedding jewelry. That wasn't much, that's not much, anything if you compare to the entire lump sum. I took some personal loans, I took bank loans. I don't know about where you come from but in Bangladesh they don't give you loans to climb a mountain. There are loans for education, there are loans to buy a fridge or a car. Those are the three. So to convince a board of a bank to give me a loan to climb was a huge hurdle. But then as I went on to climb, there were all, it somehow activated the youth and the people of the country. I've had women come up with their divorce talak money which is the money you get when you get divorced. Go free me on top of a mountain and they would donate. My colleague from the Himalayas, Patrick Morrow, who was the first person to have done the seven summits, a little before I was born, invited me to go train with him. So this is in his backyard. So he put up a very enormous, gigantic plan for me. Everything was kind of sorted out when he took me in as a daughter. But just to show you that even just the training part, you know, it's such a different climate and mountain climbing skills that you have to learn. I had to leave my rented apartment, get into a backpack and basically live in people's couches and alter to a lifestyle that I wasn't used to for a four year long period. And then just accept that anything and everything will change when you go out there and there will be things, you know, unplanned, for example, in Denali. It took me three attempts just to get to the summit, which means three years because the mountain has a very specific time to get to the summit. This is Everest on the right. That's the last 3,000 feet. This is a region that I've been working in since my late teens. I started out as an activist first and then I became a climber. So it's a very, it holds a very precious spot in my heart. This is a photo coming off the mountain that's the summit is past, but I submitted during the sunrise. When I went to Everest, I know Everest sells, but it's not because of that. Everest was a very spiritual journey for me because just to see what goes on in there, Everest is referred as, the original name is Chamulungma, which is roughly translates to Mother Goddess of the universe. I come from a very, you know, highly populated country, but I didn't expect traffic jam on Everest. And I didn't expect to see firsthand what goes on up on the mountain. I knew about it, I read about it, but to really witness what's happening to that industry and how lost we are, how far away we are in connection to spirit. A lot of people, a lot of the deaths happen when you're stuck because it's a fixed line that you have to, that we climb. And I'm also part of this whole traffic jam and a lot of climbers, you'll see that three shepherd people are like pulling one climber, they're not being able to climb. And what it creates is you lose your breath and if you're using supplementary oxygen then you lose that because someone else is causing the traffic. I've been in avalanches, I've been in situations where I've almost died in my sleep because I was buried in storms and many other situations, too long to summarize in just 30 minutes, but it ended up being a very lonely journey even though I climbed with one partner. But during this lonely period, I got to reflect on human spirit and how we connect and how fragile we are and it takes just a second to go to the other side. And we're all here for a very short time on this planet and none of this matters really. What matters is what we leave behind as a legacy to conserve. I personally crossed seven dead bodies just in the last 3,000 feet and it's really surreal because when you look up it's like heaven. It's like the most beautiful thing that you're gonna ever see on this planet. And then you look down and something that you probably feel like it's trash. It's human bodies. There are estimates that there are over 250 dead bodies up there. Most of them headless, a lot of them headless because when the body freezes, the neck is the most vulnerable and it just cracks it. I personally lost four of my very good friends during these four-year-long journeys, not necessarily for climbing, but on the mountain for different reasons. But I had to keep moving on and just keep going on and because every time I hit a wall, I remembered, I reminded myself that every time, if I fail, I fail the people who are waiting at home and they were really going all out to inspire me and there were success stories of women from all parts of the society were being highlighted. So it kind of had a huge movement back home while I was doing these climbs. Good indicator of how lonely you are is how many selfies you have taken, but none of my selfies have been on the cover yet. And then I had to pay some prices as well. I hope you've all had breakfast by now. That's a frostbitten finger that I got in Alaska. It's my ring finger. So I have no hope of marriage anymore. That's what my relatives said. In this expedition, I was trying to save money and I didn't do medical insurance just to save a few hundred dollars. And so I ended up in hospital, in the States with the Bangladeshi passport and thousands of dollars of bills. But six surgeries later, my finger is back. So end of the journey as seven summits finished and now that I reflect back, this journey has given me this entire vantage point and these lessons from nature that no school or college has ever given me. These lessons need to be translated to the people at home. And I started working on a curriculum from my lessons that I learned and I collaborated with some educators at home abroad and it's a curriculum set out in the outdoors which combines meditation and mindfulness training with scientific research proving how it affects the mind and then we take the girls back to nature and then empower them with the skills that they need to know and also lessons from various different cultures that I came across during these seven continental journeys and how I found from being a very lonely person to homes in all six continents except Antarctica. And remember that hula hoop? Karma has it that when I was starting Kilimanjaro, my friend Meredith who I was climbing with, she brings out this hula hoop and I tell her the story that happened and she was like, you know what? We just spontaneously had this idea and so she was like, you should take this back to the summit and just do it. And so I did it just as a fun thing and it sort of became a trend and I ended up taking this, by the way, this hula hoop I can fold it and it's only three and a half pounds, banana-dish flag color and I ended up taking it to the summit not to shake my waist. I do have a good waist now, but that wasn't my point. My point was to take back what was taken from me as a girl. I want the same for all the girls that are at home. Unfortunately, I had to climb Everest or other highest summits to prove a point, but when I came back to Bangladesh, what I didn't plan or hope for was that everyone who had ostracized me in the past, everyone who had kicked me out were back in my life all of a sudden and this is in the VIP section in Dhaka Airport. And I was so, I was still adjusting to civilization. The government was there, the, you know, not just here, but later on. So I was like, had I known this, I would have strategized to climb these mountains many moons ago and my father came back and said, you know, you're moving in with us. I said, no, because it just didn't make sense and I was already half-hypoxic. And the other thing that happened was how many wedding proposals I got. At home, wedding proposals come in a file, how you would apply for a job here. So it comes with a bio-data of the person, like a mugshot like this, and then how much he earns, who his family is, la, la, la. So my aunt was carrying all these files and she's very proud of them. And I don't know how climbing Everest has anything to do with weddings, but I made my own bio-data with that picture. So I give this to guys whenever they come. This is a cartoon in the national paper, kind of to show the struggles that you have to go through to reach a mountain from a country like Bangladesh. And here I want to just remind everyone that when we start our Everest journey, the Shepa people in Tibetans, they read this script that's 300 years old, praying to Chamulungma, and this is an altar, Chamulungma, the mother goddess of the universe, and asking for forgiveness on behalf of all humankind to step on her and not to, you know, asking for her kindness so we don't get thrown off by avalanches or any of her wrath. So in the first few years that I was doing the Seven Summits, I had these pilot programs going around Bangladesh and see how these lessons could help the girls. And what I realized that not only was there and an interest from the girls, every time I would visit any villages, the boys would be like, what did we do? Why aren't you teaching us? So there is a demand for it. So and then in Nepal we tested out, and in Nepal is also a demand for it. And I guess in all the South Asian countries, there's a demand for it. So we started a foundation, like I just mentioned, to teach the girls how to find their inner mountains and empower them with the skills to go climb the mountains. And I think as adults, we too need to all go back to nature and just really honor the spirit that lies there. Thank you so much. Thank you.