When Wendy Booker spoke to the fifth-grade students at Wooster Elementary, she stressed that she was just a “regular mommy.”
However regular she may be, Booker has done extraordinary things.
“Everyone can do what I am doing,” she said. “You have choices to make the decision if you want to climb Mount Everest.”
The decision to climb that mountain and others was one that Booker made personally. Booker was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a disease of the central nervous system, in 1998.
After her diagnosis, Booker, who lives near Boston, decided to run in the Boston Marathon.
“At that time, no one with MS was running in marathons,” she said. “I got angry and pushed back at the disease.”
After running that marathon, Booker was asked if she would like to climb Mount Denali or Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America.
Prior to her diagnosis, Booker had been an interior designer. She was also the single mother of three sons.
“I had to learn to climb,” she said. “I had to stop being an interior designer and learn to use tools such as ice axes, picks and ropes.”
On her first attempt, she didn’t make it to the top of Denali which is more than 20,000 feet tall.
“I wasn’t experienced enough. Many of the people on my team were the same way,” she said.
However, Booker said she had to climb to the peak. She used the mountain as a metaphor in her own life.
“I was climbing a mountain, living everyday with a chronic illness,” Booker said.
When Booker made it to the top of Denali, she was the first woman in the world with MS to do so.
“I am just a normal person who faced a challenge,” she said.
In addition to climbing mountains, Booker began working with a class of fourth-grade students at Donald McKay Elementary in inner city Boston. Originally, she was just to visit the students once, but asked to continue visiting them. She shared photos of her climbs and even talked to the students by satellite phone during her climbs.
The teacher of the class Jim Cleere is even basing a curriculum around Booker’s climbing of the seven summits. At the end of the school year, Booker and Cleere took the students to a small mountain in New Hampshire to climb a mountain.
After climbing Denali, Booker decided to face the challenge of the seven summits of the world. She has mastered six of the seven.
Her next stop was Africa to climb Killimanjaro, then to Europe to climb Mount Elbrus, then to South America to climb Mount Aconcagua. She next climbed Mount Vinson Massif in Antarctica. Her last completed peak was Mount Koscuiszko in Australia. Last spring, she attempted to climb Mount Everest in Nepal.
“Everest is a beast unto itself,” Booker said.
She described the Sherpa tribe who live around Mount Everest in Nepal and help climbers up the mountain. She said each Sherpa is named for a day of the week.
“They have very strong hearts and lungs because they are born and live thousands of feet higher than us,” Booker said.
She added that most were short with short fingers and toes.
Each climber has one Sherpa who stays with them. It takes two weeks to get to the base camp of Mount Everest and two months to climb the mountain.
As Booker prepared for the Everest climb, a Sherpa who worked with another team was killed during a fall, leaving his 19-year-old wife and baby daughter behind. Booker said in the Sherpa culture, women do not normally remarry. Instead if their family cannot take them back, they often have to travel to another town to beg for food. This situation struck Booker and led her to start an organization called The Other Side of Everest. The foundation helps Sherpa children whose parent is killed to have an education. One of the funding sources for this project comes from students in the United States. In Boston, students worked to raise money through Pennies for Sherpas, according to Booker.
“My mission is to make the world a smaller place,” Booker said. “Children from this country can help me raise money for children in Nepal.”
The students in Boston raised $1,000 to educate the young Sherpa girl. This pays for four years of school.
Booker asked the students at Wooster if they would like to help her raise a Sherpa baby.
Students raised their hands enthusiastically. Currently, Booker’s organization is helping eight Sherpa children. The children in Wooster will not only raise money to help the children in Nepal but will benefit from the class material from the seven summits.
Booker did not complete her climb to Mt. Everest because of weather, but plans to go back in spring of 2010 to try to reach her seventh summit.
Awesome blog!
I thought about starting my own blog too but I’m just too lazy so I guess I’ll just have to keep checking yours out. LOL