Empowering women in Nepal

In 2009 Maria Fernanda Palacios from Ecuador followed the MSM executive course Sustainable Tourism, where she met Dicky Chhetri from Nepal. Dicky and her sisters Lucky and Nicky Chhetri are pioneers in the field of female trekking guides.

Since 1994, they have worked towards empowering women in Nepal through their trekking agency “3 Sisters Adventure Trekking” and their NGO Empowering Women of Nepal (EWN) for training women as tour guides and hotel employees.

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Maria Fernanda Palacios and Dicky Chettri

Working in the tourism area herself since 1992 and having a lot of experience in working with governmental offices, enterprises, NGO’s, universities and communities, Maria was impressed:

I knew then that I wanted to be part of this experience. Twenty-five years ago, in Nepal, it was not possible to imagine a woman working in the Himalayan region. Their idea has actually changed women’s lives and has influenced all the Nepali society”.

In October 2016 Maria’s dream came true. She visited Nepal to share her years of experience with the students of the trekking agency. Because of the Nepali celebrations, the Dasai Festival, Maria expected just a few participants, but shortly after she started, more young women joined her classes. “Most of them were assistant guides and very few spoke English. This was a challenge for me, but I was happy to do it”.

To give the students an idea about the outside world Maria showed them the similarities and differences between Nepal and Ecuador. For local people living in a country as Nepal it is difficult to imagine Galapagos Islands and how it is to live in Maria’s home town Quito. “At that point, I felt motivated by their interest and joy when discovering about my small country, so far, so similar and so different at the same time”.

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Based on Maria’s trekking experience the days before, she taught the group about customer services and the importance of understanding customer expectations. Related to this the group prepared a role-play representing tourists in different customer service situations. For the students quite a challenging activity, not only preparing the role-play, but also standing in front of the class presenting it.

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Maria ended the day with food and drinks and closed the class with a warm thank you. “This was a very enriching experience for me. I rediscovered that knowledge can be shared with anyone when you really want to and that teaching a language is universal. Having trained indigenous illiterate women in Ecuador, I felt as if this experience completed the same mission but on the other side of the planet”.

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