Unlike most people, Rinji had “a greater motive” than bragging rights and glory. He aspires for his community to be more than “guides” and “support” climbers.
it’s bad enough to have to hear parents constantly narrate the trials and tribulations of their journey to school every day (on camels and bullock carts; swimming across lakes?) — only to return home and study by candlelight. Now imagine having a father who, at the impossibly young age of 19, is the youngest person to summit Mount Everest without any additional oxygen. Yet, 18-year-old Nima Rinji Sherpa from Kathmandu has accomplished what seemed unthinkable. He has surpassed his father’s and uncles’ record (the first brothers to scale the world’s 14 highest peaks) and become the youngest person to summit the same 14 peaks — “eight-thousanders” — this month.
Unlike most people, Rinji had “a greater motive” than bragging rights and glory. He aspires for his community to be more than “guides” and “support” climbers. More than 70 years since Tenzing Norgay’s historic feat of being the first, along with Sir Edmund Hillary, to climb Mount Everest, the Sherpas are no closer to being perceived as equal to their Western counterparts: “We are rarely seen as elite athletes in our own right in the same way that Western climbers are.” A 2017 PNAS study confirms that there is, indeed, an explanation for the extraordinary abilities of Sherpas that allows them to be better climbers — they are acclimatised to high altitudes.
However, even in the exhilaration of the ascent, Rinji is well aware that “there is a risk of not returning home.” To be able to selflessly give, only to ensure other people’s safety at the cost of one’s own, is a uniquely generous ability. It is about time that Rinji’s push bears fruit and Sherpas are given the recognition they rightfully deserve. For now, as much as the young climber’s heroic feat is a testimony to the Sherpas’ athleticism, it is yet again, a tale to be repeated, about the trials and tribulations of a man who sowed — so the later generations could reap.
