By Sydney Dean –

The View –  

For freshman Hanna Grebe, listening to Pemba Sherpa talk about climbing Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and growing up in Nepal without electricity or running water was “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Grebe attended the Oct. 22 presentation in the Castle View auditorium, which was sponsored by the ABC parent organization and teacher Wes Chapman.

Chapman’s humanities class was reading the book, “Into Thin Air,” an account of the 1996 Mt. Everest expedition disaster, and began to study the Sherpa culture. “It seemed like a perfect combination to bring in someone who actually identified with that culture to give us some perspective on the differences out there,” Chapman said.

Hailey Bennett, a junior, thought the presentation was interesting. “I loved hearing about how different his village is from where we live,” she said.

“Hearing him talk about Nepal and where he came from was just really cool,” Grebe added.

Sherpa grew up in a small village in Nepal known as Sengma. He has led 42 treks in the Himalayan region and climbed Kilimanjaro five times, once running it and returning within 18 hours.

Sherpa, whose last name was described by Chapman as just like Smith, or Jones, also described his home as a place with no electricity, no plumbing, no running water and no roads. The walk to school was a three-hour trek and, if he was late, he’d get whipped on the arm with a bamboo pole that would leave a mark for a month.

“Looking back on those days, I knew there was a way to make a shortcut for the students going to school,” Sherpa said. “I was able to raise $20,000 to build this bridge to help the students get to school faster, as well as help the local people get to the markets and different destinations.”

Chapman hoped those who listened to Sherpa gained a greater understanding of differences in global cultures.

“I wanted the audience who attended the event to gain some perspective of who they are within a community that’s very affluent, very wealthy,” he said. “Not everybody lives like Americans do — almost so much that we are the exception, that we oftentimes view the rest of the world as different or weird, but in reality a lot of the world views us as the weird ones.”

Pemba Sherpa ended his presentation with a simple statement: “You guys are very lucky, living a very comfortable life. And I think understanding that is good.”