KATHMANDU: For Dabuti Sherpa, coffee is not just a brewed drink; it is much more and beyond. Sometimes, it is a preference to a particular lifestyle or if you may call it an addiction to live the way you always wanted makes you feel fresh and active.
When you love the way you live, you never leave that pattern of living at least in your lifetime. This is why Dabuti Sherpa calls it an addiction. She narrates, “Coffee came to my life when she received Barista training in 2012.” A Barista is a person who prepares and serves coffee drinks and usually works in a coffeehouse. Her life took a positive turn thanks to the coffee.
Her relationship with the cup of coffee grew so strong that she has served millions of cups of coffee to millions of people with love and tenderness. As the aroma of brewed coffee fills her nostrils, she gets transported into her inner being and gets down to serving the customers with a cup of coffee all religiously.
She has been living with the rising fogs of aroma diffusing in her being for 6 years when an idea struck her all to do with coffee again. It was like a divine hand guiding her to brew coffee at a different place in a different way as if to delve deep into its aroma to come out with a newer being after taking every sip of it.
It was her hunch feeling or an intuitive discovery that she decided to brew coffee on the summit of Mt Everest and serve the same. The idea just got stuck to her and she immediately began to work on it. She consulted her friends and shared her idea to brew coffee at the summit of Mt Everest and serve it to fellow climbers.
As it was expected given the kind of fancy she had to brew coffee at the top of Mt Everest, some of her friends supported her by hailing her as unconventional while others dismissed it altogether calling her a crazy girl.
There was no question of going back on what Dabuti had thought. Call her crazy, obsessed or whatever; she would always get absorbed in her thought what it would be to brew coffee on the top of the Mt Everest. It was the year 2018 when she chose a mission – ‘promote agriculture of Nepal’ for her Everest climb with other team-mates under the banner of “First Barista Everest Expedition 2018.”
Dabuti was so determined in her resolve to climb Mt Everest that she took on the Ramdung Peak (5,925m) for mountaineering experience and she did it successfully. She assessed her own grits and stamina. Finally, a day arrived when she set out for climbing Mt Everest.
She was thrilled and nervous both as final moments were coming near when she would fulfill her dream. She knew very well that scaling Mt Everest was not that easy like she attempted a small mountain peak before. She began to feel uncomfortable when she reached Camp II. She was suffering from sleeplessness and feeling nauseated.
“But, I never gave up hope even when I was physically tired and exhausted,” Dabuti said while talking to Khabarhub. “My mental resolve made me overcome my physical exhaustion and the very next day I was up on my feet to march ahead and reached Camp III to take rest,” she continues.
Dabuti reached the Summit of Mt Everest on May 14, 2018, at around 8 am. She couldn’t stay at the summit for more than 20-25 minutes because of the sudden turn in the weather conditions. She immediately got down to make the coffee and served it to the four fellow climbers.
She served the coffee to two fellow Nepali climbers and two foreigners – one Chinese and another Ukrainian. She had brewed the black coffee of “Himalayan Arabica Coffee” brand on the summit of Mt Everest with the help of a handmade coffee maker.
She shares, “Earlier we had a plan to make the coffee during the course of the expedition while passing through different camps but we didn’t succeed in our plan due to tiredness and unfavorable circumstances on the way to the summit.”
Her feat was duly recognized by none other than World Book of Records, London calling her accomplishment in its record as “First Barista in the world to the summit, make and serve coffee at the top of the Mount Everest”. Dabuti was felicitated for what some of her friends called it a crazy idea to brew coffee at the summit of the Mt Everest. She also released her video of making coffee and serving it to fellow team-mates with her voice recorded in it.
Dabuti Sherpa and her team hurried up to descend down the base camp as weather conditions suddenly turned bad. While returning to the base camp, the wind was blowing with gusto and the sky was pitch dark. All the climbers were afraid; she too crawled down safely.
At the South Col, when her guide, removed the gloves to change the oxygen cylinders, his hands turned blue seeing which she got scared. She learned an immediate lesson to become self-dependent and should not ask assistance from others by putting them in hazard.
She asked her guide to wear the gloves to keep his hands safe in highly cold conditions. Such a worst condition of weather it was that the climbers waiting for final summit-push staying at Base Camp thought that those who have reached the summit would have died.
As luck was with our side, we returned to base-camp safely. Dabuti shivers recounting the scary situation she was in while returning from the summit to the base-camp of Mt Everest. “I am a Sherpa girl and taking risk is our way of life,” declares Dabuti when she remembers her childhood days when her school teacher used to say: “You are born as a Sherpa child and you will climb the Mt Everest one day when you grow up”.
The prophecy of her teacher came true, she says with a proud smile. A mountain-climb teaches valuable lessons of life which have all the shades to teach valuable lessons of life – struggle, happiness and never to end continuity, Dabuti reflects philosophically.
She concludes with her future plan, “Once you climb Mt Everest, you develop an appetite to climb more mountains and this is how I climbed Mount Ama Dublan (6,812 meters). She is also planning to climb Mont Blanc (4,808m) of France this September.
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