Twenty-eight-year-old trailblazer Elham Qasimi hit the headlines last year when she became the first Arab woman to reach the North Pole and the first UAE national to attempt an unassisted unsupported expedition there.
All supplies for the last couple of hundred nautical miles to the North Pole were carried either on a sled led by Elham or on dog sleds, she says. And once she got there, she made her first phone call to Shaikh Ahmad Bin Saeed Al Maktoum.
“For me [this trip] was different. It was deliberately the diametric opposite of anything I had grown up with or experienced. I wanted to succeed despite that,” she says. Most people on the journey were well-trained people with immense knowledge on the slopes.
Born in Dubai, she spent her early childhood in the US. Always a determined and active person, at age six she started to swim every day and took up gymnastics. At age 12, she took up Tang Soo Do, a Korean martial arts technique competed nationally in the US, earning silver and gold medals in the forms of weapons and free sparring. She also did well academically.
Elham finished high school in the UAE in 1999 and graduated from Al Mawakeb High School with a distinction award for attaining 96 per cent graduating average and The President’s Shield. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Business with a specialisation in Marketing at the American University in Dubai in 2004.
Elham believes it was particularly important for her to step up and take on the North Pole challenge as a woman. She believes that because women are half the population or half the capital that society has and because they raise the next generation, it is important for them to have life experiences which will help them grow as individuals. “In the multiple roles that women play we can maximise their impact by simply realigning access and exposure to character-building experiences, which will be different from person to person but the effect the same,” she says.
Elham is a firm believer in gaining as much real-life experience as possible. She says, “We must be a little more proactive in seeking out such experiences and more importantly the right experiences if we wish to grow. I sought the most extremes of external conditions to obtain internal growth.”
