A Woman for Women

The advocate Christine Amour-Levar is achieving no mean feats for her favourite cause

- Chit L Lijauco

It almost sounds like a love song: I will bike through the hottest place on earth; go to the coldest, windiest and most remote continent; ride on semi-wild horses in Mongolia; climb many mountains in the Himalayas, Iceland and Africa. But not quite. Rather, these are awesome feats, just some, achieved by an amazing woman for other women.

The woman is Christine Amour-Levar, French-Swiss-Filipina social entrepreneur-adventurer-author-advocate—so says her website (www. christineamourlevar.com). The other women are those underprivileged affected by climate change under HER Planet Earth and those who have been subjected to violence and abuse under Women on a Mission (WOAM). Both are award-winning not-for-profit organisations that this multi-hyphenate co-founded and founded in 2012 and 2017, respectively. Their common goal? To take all-female teams on pioneering expeditions to support worthy causes.

Since 2012, Amour-Levar has taken a total of 150 women to cross the Danakil Desert of Ethiopia on bikes (November 2017) and to the summit of two unclimbed peaks in Antartica’s Heritage Range (January 2018). She led them as the first all-female team to migrate with the Nenets reindeer of Siberia (December 2015), to cross the Lut Desert of Iran on foot and to cross Greenland’s Arctic Circle Train in winter by fatbike. She and her fearless female adventurers have done the world’s first stand-up-paddleboard descent of rivers in Bhutan, crossed the world’s largest caves in Vietnam, trekked 100km with Samburu warriors in Kenya and so much more. In all, the expeditions raised close to US$1.5 million for charities that advance the position of women around the world.

It all started with a chance encounter with, you guessed it, a woman.