ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — You just never know where life is going to take you.
If Albuquerque’s Christine Glidden had not struggled scaling Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro a few years ago, she would not be working so hard today on a project to benefit young women in Nepal.
Glidden’s project, Women to Be, delivers feminine hygiene products to girls in refugee camps and remote and poor areas of Nepal. Such things are taken for granted in more developed parts of the world. But when they are made available in Nepal, they can change, even save, the lives of the young women who live in this South Asian country in the Himalayas.
Glidden traveled to Nepal in 2014 to deliver feminine hygiene kits, containing underwear and sanitary pads, and she will do so again in April of next year. But her journey started in Tanzania.
In 2012, Glidden’s daughter, Jenna, a track star at Cibola High back in the early 2000s, asked her mom to accompany her on a climb of 19,340-foot Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. Glidden was in her early 60s at the time, but she has been a triathlete since 1996 and is probably more fit than most people half her age. Besides, it so happens that her resolution that year was to do things she normally would not attempt.
“When my daughter came to me and said we should climb Kilimanjaro, I just said yes,” Glidden said. “I didn’t even think about it.”
Glidden was wishing she had thought more about it on that day in July 2012 when her climbing party made its push to the summit.
“You start at midnight and climb with headlamps for six hours,” Glidden said. “It is so steep that the Sandias, where I was training, seem flat to me now.”
Glidden made it to the top, but the climb took its toll on her.
“Kilimanjaro was way too hard for me,” she said. “I wanted to do something easier. I decided to go to Nepal and do something in the Himalayas.”
The Himalayas? That’s easier?
“Well, I wasn’t going to try Everest,” Glidden said.
As she was preparing for her expedition to Nepal, Glidden visited with Duka, a woman from Nepal she had met through a mutual friend.
Duka (Glidden prefers not to divulge her friend’s last name) told Glidden about tens of thousands of refugees, members of a Nepali minority, who had been forced out of Bhutan, a country on the eastern edge of the Himalayas, in 1991. Some of these people settled in refugee camps in the south of Nepal.
“Duka lived in a refugee camp for 17 years,” Glidden said. “There was no electricity, no running water. Six people lived to a bamboo shack.”
Duka told Glidden that the young women in these camps did not have access to basic hygiene items.
“Girls without these items can contract infection,” Glidden said. “They stay home to take care of themselves every month. They drop out of school, marry prematurely and begin to have children at an early age. They lead lives of indignity and dependence.”
Glidden said life can be very different for those who do have these items.
“They can go to school every day of the month,” she said. “They learn a skill, marry later, have two fewer children and boost their incomes by 20 to 25 percent. They also speak up against violence and become economic drivers of their villages. They live with dignity and can care for themselves and their families.”
Suddenly, Glidden’s trek to the Himalayas in 2014 became a mission.
“When Duka told me about this situation in this refugee camp, I couldn’t get it out of my mind,” said Glidden, now 64. “I thought, ‘I’m going over there anyway. Now I have something to do.’ ”
She found out about an organization, Days for Girls, that had designed a kit, intended to last up to three years, that contains underwear, sanitary pads, a washcloth and a zipper storage bag.
Glidden managed to get 380 of these kits made, some by Albuquerque volunteers, some in a sewing center in Nepal, in time to take them to a refugee camp during her 2014 expedition.
“In April, my plan is to deliver 1,000 kits to a remote region of Nepal called the Kingdom of Mustang, high in the Himalayas near Tibet,” she said. “It was devastated by the (April 2015) earthquake. The people are very, very poor. There is no store you can go to. I will have a social worker who will guide me and act as interpreter. I will probably have to use horses.”
Again, some of the kits will be made in Albuquerque by volunteers at Ann Silva’s Bernina Sewing Center and the Hipstitch Quilting Store. Three Albuquerque Rotary Clubs – Sandia, Metro and Sunrise – are helping, either with sewing or through donations.
Glidden is also trying to raise money to establish a sewing center in Nepal that will not only make the hygiene kits but also pay Nepali women a living wage to work in the center.
There will be a fundraiser from 4 to 7 p.m. Feb. 20 at Dekker/Perich/Sabatini, 7601 Jefferson NE. Tickets cost $35 and may be purchased by looking for “Women to Be” on Eventbrite.com. For more information, go to www.Women2Be.org or to www.facebook.com/WomenToBe.
