AMMAN — When
Alaa Al-Juneidi, 33, is thousands of feet above sea level on Mount Everest, he
will raise the flag of Jordan along with that of his country, Palestine. He
picked Jordan’s Independence Day on May 25 to make his planned ascent to the
top of the world.
اضافة اعلان
He will also display a
list of 8,488 names of his supporters and would-be mountaineers, who believed
in him and his dream to stand on the top of the world’s highest peaks,
culminating in the Everest ascent.
“It is an honor to
have the Jordanian along with the Palestinian flag raised on the top of the
world not only on the Kingdom’s Independence Day, but also as Jordan is proudly
celebrating its 100th anniversary,” Alaa, who is already in Nepal preparing for
the adventure, told Jordan News.
The Jordanian flag was
handed to Alaa in Amman last week by Minister of Youth Mohammad Al-Nabulsi, who
thanked the young traveler and wished him a safe trip and a successful venture.
“This is a token of
appreciation and gratitude for Jordan, for the support of Palestine and the
Palestinian rights all these years,” the food production
engineer-turned-traveler said.
At the personal level,
Jordan is where the young man started. It is his departure point and
destination as he travels and returns from his journeys.
In Jordan, he received
his university degree and worked at his family’s business for seven years
before he decided to pursue a dream that had lived with him since he was a boy
in Hebron in the West Bank, where he was born and raised.
Dare to be
Juneidi’s Everest
adventure, branded under the title Dare to Be, is part of a plan to mount the
summit in 80 days, and to “show the world, and especially young Palestinians,
that nothing is impossible”, according to the project’s literature.
“This is how the Dare
to Be project was born — for each of the 8848m of Mount Everest, Alaa will take
names of 8,488 names who contributed to his journey.”
The team of The School
of Travel, the adventure business Alaa established last year, plan to
immortalize the trip by making a documentary, as with video material this
initiative will reach more people around the world.
Six summits
Alaa, the program’s
brochure says, was “quite a globetrotter at a young age, travelled to 48
countries, with an impressive count of 6 summits reached — twice the top of
Kilimanjaro (2017 and 2021) and Mount Elbrus in Russia (July 2017), Annapurna
Circuit, Himalayas (November 2018), Everest Base Camp (November 2019), Himlung,
Himalayas, (November 2020) and Mount Meru (January 2021), where he completed
the altitude day run. His last trip in January 2021 to Tanzania was a training
for his final destination — Mount Everest”.
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