About this item
Imagine yourself in a schoolroom in one of the most remote regions of one of the most hard-to-reach countries on earth. Nepal. The Lower Mustang region to be exact. To reach it takes a 14-hour flight from New York to Doha, Qatar. Then four hours by air to Kathmandu. Transfer at one of the world's most dangerous airports to a 90-minute flight to Pokhara, followed by a jarring, eight-hour Jeep ride over a vertiginous dirt road - one side is a mountain wall, the other side a two-hundred foot cliff. Finally you arrive, but it's not just any schoolroom. It has been converted into an operating room so that doctors from New York Eye & Ear Infirmary can provide the gift of sight to 24 Nepalis who were blind due to advanced cataracts. Jeff Blumenfeld witnessed this first hand.
About the Author
Jeff Blumenfeld, author, You Want to Go Where? Jeff Blumenfeld is founder of Blumenfeld and Associates, Inc. , a public relations and special-events firm based in Darien, Connecticut, that has served some of the largest outdoor recreation companies in the U.S. Clients have included Coleman, Duofold, Du Pont, Eddie Bauer, Lands' End, LEKI USA, Lewmar, Mares, Orvis, Timberland, Timex, W.L. Gore & Associates, and Wacoal Sports Science Corp. Blumenfeld is also editor and publisher of Expedition News, a newsletter, blog and website () he founded in 1994 to cover news about the adventure-marketing field. Excerpts from Expedition News also appear in The Explorers Club Explorers Journal. A member of The Explorers Club in New York, he also belongs to the American Alpine Club, based in Golden, Colorado, and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London, where he has presented talks on adventure marketing. Blumenfeld has traveled on business to some of the remotest regions on earth. He journeyed to Anadyr, an isolated outpost in the Soviet Far East, and escorted media personnel to an Eskimo village on Canada's Baffin Island and to Iceland, a long-time client. A media trip to Yellowknife, NWT, for Lands' End included a dogsled trip for reporters, cross-country skiing on a frozen lake, and a spectacular display of the northern lights. Blumenfeld journeyed to Santiago, Chile, to organize the first ski race in Antarctica, spent two weeks in Nome and Anchorage during promotion of an expedition across the Bering Strait, enlisted a team of ski instructors to test ski apparel at 12,000 feet in the High Andes of Argentina, and promoted skiing and a midnight golf tournament near the Arctic Circle in Iceland. He's co-organized media hiking trips to Salzburg, Austria, and to the summit of Snowbird, Utah, on behalf of W.L. Gore & Associates. In 1996, after tragedy struck Mount Everest and eight people died, LIFE magazine hired Blumenfeld to help research their coverage of the disaster. Blumenfeld is a former adjunct faculty member of the New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies/Marketing and Management Institute. A graduate of Syracuse University, he holds a Bachelor of Science in television and radio from the S.I. Newhouse School of Journalism. He is a board member of Voices of September 11, the leading advocacy group for the friends and families of victims of 9/11 (voicesofsept11. org) , and a member of the New Canaan, Connecticut Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) . An avid sea kayaker, fly-fishing angler, downhill skier and sailor, he's also fluent in Morse code, although he'll be first to admit it doesn't come up too often in conversation.
