It was a beautiful morning. Christine Amour-Levar had just woken up in her tent in the middle of the Dasht-e Lut salt desert in Iran, ready to tackle another day’s worth of trekking. Suddenly, a team member popped her head into Amour-Levar’s tent, uttering: “We have a problem.”
Their primary guide had disappeared. His shoes and equipment were still in his tent, but he was nowhere to be found. With the help of the other guides, they found him wandering aimlessly a few hours later. He had suffered a “breakdown of some sort”. The team had to decide whether to continue with the expedition or turn around. Ultimately, everyone chose the former and made sure the guide received the necessary medical attention.
In another incident, this time in the icy climes of Siberia, the vehicle Amour-Levar and her team were in cracked a frozen river. The wheels sank into the water. Fortunately, half of it remained on solid ground. Pulling the other half out before the rest of the river cracked was a race against time.
“That’s nature for you,” Amour-Levar says. “You can prepare as much as you want and train with your team, but sometimes, nature throws curveballs and you just have to deal with them.”
Photo: Joel Low.
Climbing Mountains, Smashing Records
The swashbuckling adventurer is the founder of Women on a Mission and HER Planet Earth, non-profit organisations that focus on empowering women and the environment, respectively. The French-Swiss-Filipino has been raising funds for over a decade but her passion to help people has never wavered.
Her latest endeavour involved being part of the world’s largest all-female rope team to summit a mountain. Switzerland Tourism had invited her to climb a mountain in the Swiss Alps with 79 other female advocates from 25 countries in June this year. With this, the agency hoped to empower women around the world by helping them literally reach the top of the world.
“I said yes to the last-minute opportunity without knowing the details!” Amour-Levar recalls laughing.
In the same way as her previous expeditions, the climb threw up its own set of challenges. As Amour-Levar is used to, a team of 10 can already be a logistical nightmare. When you multiply that by eight, some of whom have never stepped on snow, let alone worn crampons, the danger grows exponentially.
Originally, the group wanted to conquer Allalinhorn. However, when a few guides went to survey the route the day before the climb, they realised that the unusually hot summer had melted the ice and made the ground unstable. The guides fell into multiple crevasses. One even dangled helplessly on a rope after sinking into an unusually deep one.
“The Swiss are extremely organised,” says Amour-Levar. During dinner the evening before the ascent, the guides shared an alternative plan with the team. They had already organised buses to transport the climbers to Zermatt, where they would take the gondola up to 3,200m before climbing the rest of the way to the top of Breithorn.
While some women suffered from altitude sickness, others felt extremely fatigued. “Elevation affects everyone differently. You can run marathons regularly and still feel unwell,” Amour-Levar explains. Nevertheless, everyone was driven by the mission to reach the top. All 80 women reached the peak of the 4,164-m mountain after trekking for seven hours.
Recognising Privilege
The 40-something consultant — “I stopped counting after my 40th birthday!” — was once obsessed with scaling corporate mountains. The globetrotter has advanced the interests of organisations such as Nike and Temasek Trust. But deep within herself, Amour-Levar knew there was more to life than presentations, pitches, and products.
“My family moved to France when I was 5 and I returned to my birth country, the Philippines, when I turned 10. My aunt picked us up in her Mercedes-Benz and I remember vividly the drive through the streets.”
She noticed young girls in the slums wearing tattered clothes and playing barefoot on the ground. Amour-Levar was aware of her privileged position in life even at that young age. “I remember thinking, ‘They look so happy with nothing. This isn’t fair. They didn’t get to choose where they were born. How come they don’t have what I have?'”
As life got in the way, this sense of outrage gradually subsided. She grew up, graduated from multiple international universities, built a career, and married twice. She also managed to have four children along the way.
Reinventing Amour-Levar
After a chance conversation with an acquaintance, Valerie Boffy, in 2012 while sending their children to school, her desire to contribute to society was reignited. “One day, Boffy told me she would be away for seven weeks because she was going to try climbing Mount Everest,” Amour-Levar recalls. She wasn’t just climbing for vanity; Boffy was raising money for Women for Women International, a non-profit founded by famous Iraqi-American activist Zainab Salbi.
Amour-Levar was enamoured. She followed Boffy’s progress up the mountain, cheered when she reached the summit and later peppered her with questions about the expedition and the organisation she was raising funds for when she returned. “I thought: ‘I must support this charity’,” says Amour-Levar.
So, Boffy and she set an audacious goal: raise $100,000 and bring 10 women to the Everest Base Camp (EBC). Together with eight other women, they reached the EBC in October 2012. By raising $150,000, they surpassed their goal for Women for Women International.
Then, something magical happened.
“I received lots of messages from other women asking, ‘When is the next one?'” Amour-Levar says. Thus, she and Boffy established Women on a Mission and began raising money for charities that support women through annual climbs or treks.
Participants pay for these expeditions themselves and commit to raising a certain amount of funds for the charity. Usually, training begins nine months in advance. The waitlist grows longer every year, despite the extensive time commitments.
And Still, She Rises
It’s fitting then that on the 10th anniversary of the founding of Women on a Mission, Amour-Levar is reaching another milestone: writing a book.
Published by Penguin and slated to come out in September, Wild Wisdom chronicles a decade’s worth of adventures and life lessons. While writing down her thoughts, Amour-Levar admits that she became emotional. “I would cry while releasing these memories because we had close shaves in many of the places we visited.”
In addition to gender issues, she hopes the book will encourage readers to consider sociological and environmental issues as well. Women have indeed made great strides over the past century — universal suffrage, equality in education and healthcare, and a decrease in gender-based violence, to name a few — but there is still much more to be done, especially in the upper echelons.
According to the World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Gender Gap report, fewer than 5 per cent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. Furthermore, they make up only a quarter of a country’s parliament and earn 37 per cent less than men in similar roles.
Photo: Joel Low.
There has also been a reversal of some progress due to the pandemic. Four out of 10 women considered leaving their companies or switching jobs, and more women suffered from burnout than men according to the McKinsey report Women in the Workplace 2021.
A major cause of this was the disintegration of the support system around child-rearing, such as childcare and schooling. Many women had to assume additional responsibilities then due to tired tropes of them being the primary caregiver.
Building A Better Tomorrow
Photo: Joel Low.
Even so, Amour-Levar is an optimist. “Many get discouraged and say that it’s too difficult. But, doing nothing is worse. Anything worth doing is usually difficult. It’s like pushing a boulder up a hill. There will be days when you get tired, but you know that you’ll eventually reach the top.”
Boulders ascend faster with more hands, so she is grateful that so many allies are joining her in the fight.
Additionally, Amour-Levar believes that affirmative action or positive discrimination policies, are essential, despite growing doubts about their effectiveness. “When a company must find a woman to fill a leadership role with a woman, the HR team tends to work harder to find someone suitable.”
So, she continues fighting. She teaches her sons to respect women and tells her daughters that they can accomplish anything they set their minds on.
Towards the end of our interview, she pulled out her phone and showed me a picture of her eldest son in Ladakh. He was 14 then, and his tired face looked at the camera after climbing 5,000m. She says, with pride in her voice, “Look at the flag he’s holding. He carried it up with him.” HER Planet Earth’s logo was emblazoned on the flag.
Photography: Joel Low
Video Director and Editor: Belle Chew
Styling: Chia Wei Choong
Hair: Sean Ang, using Goldwell
Makeup: Wee Ming, using Dior Beauty
Photography Assistant: Eddie Teo
Styling Assistant: Bryan Ho
