Guest Blog

[caption id="attachment_2716" align="alignright" width="300"] Ascending Chachacomani (source: Griselda Moreno)Mujer Montaña—“Woman Mountain” in Spanish—participated in a recent project of the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation (UIAA), in which women climbers from Latin America and Europe carried out ascents of peaks in two mountain ranges in the Bolivian Andes. They established mountaineering records, achieving first all-female ascents and opening new routes. They met another goal as well,  promoting exchanges between people of different cultures and worldviews. And, in their distinctive way, they built awareness of mountains in the context of climate change—a key goal of the UIAA’s Mountain Protection Award Platform, which supported the project.This post was originally posted last year on the GlacierHub.org by Ben Orlove.This project, supported by a number of government agencies and tourism firms in South America and Europe, brought together the members of Mujer Montaña, a Latin American group founded in 2013, with representatives of the Women’s High Mountain Group of the French...

[caption id="attachment_2632" align="alignright" width="300"] The Wild Nettle Plant grows about 6ft-7ft tall.Reminiscing a conversation with her grandmother, Kala Kumari, a Kulung woman said, “according to our grandmother the first plant we ate was nettle and during a time of which lasted for a year in the 70’s, we survived because of nettle.”Nettle plant grows throughout Nepal. The Kulung community values nettle both as plant and fabric. Nettle fabric also has a long tradition in the Kulung community. The skills of making nettle fabric have been passed on from women to women through generations. It also holds a spiritual significance with birth and death as the community uses the cloth made from nettle fabric to cover a new-born baby as well as a deceased body.[caption id="attachment_2633" align="alignleft" width="300"] Once the bark is removed, the Wild Nettle gets processed by boiling it for several hours to soften it.In the district of Sankhuwasabha, where...