I was visiting Nepal’s capital city, Kathmandu, in the early 1990s with my daughter Heidi when a Tibetan activist living in Switzerland, Tsultim Tersey, asked for my help.
Could I arrange for several monks and nuns to fly to Zurich? They had been part of the 1989 exodus of Tibetans in the wake of the post–Tiananmen Square crackdown by the Chinese.
One of the big themes at the Milken Global Conference last month was that the rate of economic growth in developing countries now exceeds the rate of growth in developed countries. That statement hasn’t been true since the industrial revolution began two centuries ago.
We could hear the sound of guns and rocket blasts from the other side of Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport. It was the fall of 1967, and I was having dinner in Saigon the night before starting a research assignment for the U.S. Office of Navy Research. My task was to suggest ideas for developing South Vietnam’s local economies when the war ended.
It was February 2014, and Norbu Tenzing was chatting with his visitors at the American Himalayan Foundation. “It’s just a matter of time until there is another big disaster on Everest,” he said.
You say you want to climb Mount Everest? Wind gusts on the world’s highest peak last week were clocked at 70 miles per hour. Air temperatures were minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
I’m excited to be part of a panel on developing economies this week at the 20th annual Milken Global Conference. The gathering, bringing together 3,500 senior leaders from 50 countries, opened Sunday in Los Angeles.
I thought I had seen the worst of the world’s extreme poverty in Tibet and Nepal, but people I met in Ethiopian villages and across the western border in South Sudan on my first visit in the late 1990s were emaciated, lacking food and the most basic health care.
When former President Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, the Norwegian Nobel Committee hailed his nonprofit humanitarian organization, The Carter Center, for its “hard work on many fronts to fight tropical diseases and to bring about growth and progress in developing countries.”
Nepali journalist Subina Shrestha’s moving speech and challenge to sharply expand the work of our trafficking prevention program in her home country drew hundreds of new visitors to our blog this past week. We welcome you!
We’re excited this week to share a few stories from world-class mountaineer Pasang Lhamu Sherpa Akita, and notes of appreciation from members of STOP Girl Trafficking’s alumnae community, students enrolled in upper grades, and other women in projects funded by the American Himalayan Foundation.
A courageous witness to the scourge of slavery and trafficking of girls in her home country, Nepali journalist and filmmaker Subina Shrestha currently is researching at Harvard University how women and minorities in Nepal can achieve social and political rights.
Her moving speech to 300 guests at our March 23 fundraiser in San Francisco (photo above) helped us raise $350,000 to continue educating 14,000 girls and protect them from traffickers in Nepal. This is an edited version of Subina’s talk:
