Project Awesome visits CHIJ Secondary School
As the December holidays began, some of the students at CHIJ Secondary were hard at work attending their year-end leadership camp. The teachers graciously extended an invitation to Project Awesome to visit the school.
With us were Joanne Soo and Lee Peh Gee of the Singapore Women’s Everest Team (SWET), who, along with the rest of their team, successfully reached the summit of Mount Everest in 2009. Their journey to the expedition involved half a decade of training, fundraising, and promoting their shared vision to attempt a feat of this magnitude. The team was one of the inaugural inductees to the Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame in 2014 for being the first all-female Singaporean team to ascend and succeed in climbing the tallest mountain in the world.
Exploring the theme of “Friendship is Magic”, Joanne and Peh Gee imparted essential lessons in teamwork, responsibility, and grit to the students, using their experiences as examples. The students were also able to see for the first time images taken during the team’s ascent and at the Everest base camp. The speakers shared candidly about their challenges, reminding us that the path that leaders take is never smooth–sailing, but with the support of those around us, our dreams and goals can be achieved.
After their expedition, the team published a memoir detailing their journey to Everest. Three copies were gifted as prizes to students who won the quiz. SWET’s story was also featured in Awesome Women of Singapore, a book for children launched in March 2021 by SCWO and Epigram Books.
Joanne and Peh Gee ended their talk with a quote from Outward Bound founder Kurt Hahn, familiar to the mountaineering community and applicable to the leaders in all of us, no matter where our interests and passions lie: “There is more in us than we know. If we can be made to realise this, perhaps for the rest of our lives, we will never be able to settle for less.”
Project Awesome is the educational outreach arm of the Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame, an initiative by SCWO. If your school is interested to learn more about the achievements of women in Singapore or would like to find ways to collaborate, drop us an email at swhf@scwo.org.sg.
