Ben Ayers ’99 has spent most of his working life in Nepal supporting sustainable economic development. He also has a recent and acclaimed National Geographic film documentary to his credit.

And if you ask him, he might say that the secret to his success was being a bad ski jumper in high school.

To kick off the �ֲ���ý Outing Club’s 100th anniversary year, Ayers, a BOC president as a student, visited campus on Jan. 15 to share stories and lessons from his path from �ֲ���ý to Nepal, including the ability to “let go” that got him to where he is today.

Spirits were high at the event, held in the Benjamin Mays Center, during which Ayers was honored with the Alumni Association’s Alumni Community Service Award. Students, having just returned to campus from break, shared stories about their vacation adventures. And they weren’t the only ones reuniting: BOC alumni from the last 50 years shook hands with friends, met current students, and mingled over �ֲ���ý’ famous chai and cookies.

Ayers began his talk with a story about ski jumping. Growing up in New Hampshire — the only U.S. state to offer ski jumping as a high school sport — Ayers was excited to give it a shot.

Standing before a projected photo from his high school ski-jumping days, Ben Ayers ’99 speaks during a �ֲ���ý Outing Club 100th anniversary kickoff event on Jan. 15 in the Benjamin Mays Center. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

But no matter how hard he practiced and how much he envisioned himself making perfect jumps, he never improved. Discouraged, he stopped going to practice and, more importantly, stopped caring whether or not he was any good.

Only then did he begin to excel, eventually becoming one of the state’s top schoolboy ski jumpers.

Once he got to �ֲ���ý, Ayers said, he “needed to find something else that I was bad at.” From his experience ski jumping, he knew he had an affinity for outdoor adventure, which led him to try rock climbing with the Outing Club.

Ayers explained how his roommate began teaching him to climb, and he devoted himself to it with the same “fervor and lack of skill.” By letting go of the need for instant perfection, and depending on help from friends, Ayers discovered that “adventure begets adventure.” He kept trying new things, immersed himself in new adventures, and excelled in ways he’d never thought possible.

From left, 1999 classmates Ben Ayers, Brad Morse, Erik Thomson, and John MacKay pause during construction of the �ֲ���ý Outing Club lean-to in May 1999. Located in nearby Greene on protected land provided by BOC adviser Judy Marden ’66, the 10-by-17 lean-to is modeled on Appalachian Trail structures. (Judy Marden ’66)

During his junior year, Ayers studied abroad in Nepal, unaware that it would entirely alter the course of his life. After graduating from �ֲ���ý with an English major, Ayers moved back to Nepal with $300 (which was stolen from its oh-so-original hiding place in the hotel wall), and has been there pretty much ever since.

In 1999, Ayers founded a nonprofit, Porter’s Progress, to help supply Nepali porters with gear and medical skills to improve their safety in the Himalayas. He then went on to become the executive director of dZi foundation, through which — building schools and improving agricultural, water, and sanitation systems — in order to, as he once said, help “develop the kind of prosperity that can make a community more resilient.”

The large crowd, including many �ֲ���ý Outing Club alumni and students, react to Ben Ayers’ talk on Jan. 15 at the Benjamin Mays Center. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“We basically went to communities and asked them what their dreams for the next few years were,” Ayers told his �ֲ���ý audience. Such as: “What was the beauty in their life? What was the strength in their life? What were their dreams for the future?” His goal was to help these communities build strengths to help themselves, and that’s what Ayers has been doing for the past 20 years.

In 2016, Ayers led a National Geographic documentary crew up cliffs, trailing Mauli Dhan Rai on his last foray to harvest so-called mad honey. He shared a bit about the years of establishing the friendships and trust necessary to film such a dangerous and sacred task.

Wearing bee suits, photographer Renan Ozturk (left) and Ben Ayers ’99 prepare to capture Mauli Dhan Rai as he harvests a valuable hallucinogenic honey from a cliffside in Nepal’s Hongu River Valley. (Courtesy of Renan Ozturk)

“It all just happened because I choose to do things that I was really bad at,” he said. “I took a leap of faith that helped me learn and helped me listen, and it helped me connect with people who were different than I was.”

Trying things that we’re bad at, Ayers continued, also teaches us humility. “It’s important to be humbled.”

“By putting yourself in a position of being helped, you can then understand how to go about helping other people.”

He continued, “Not everyone has the privilege to travel. Not everyone has the opportunities to fail, and if you do, you have an obligation to. It’s going to teach you courage and it’s going to teach you fear.”

Ayers continued, “I’ve had the privilege to fail. I’ve had enough opportunity to try things I was bad at. And in doing that, I learned that at large, people are really forgiving, people are really understanding.”

Ayers also encouraged his audience to surround themselves with people who are different from them. “Put yourself in a position to accept help,” said Ayers. “By putting yourself in a position of being helped, you can then understand how to go about helping other people.”

Ben Ayers ’99 chats with a friend prior to his Jan. 15 talk at the Benjamin Mays Center, kicking off the 100th anniversary of the �ֲ���ý Outing Club. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Early in the program, Ayers took time to thank Judy Marden ’66, longtime BOC adviser, for her years of dedication to the club. “Judy has been the North Star of the Outing Club long before I was a student,” Ayers said.

“I also want to thank Judy for remaining friends with me after I dragged her up to Everest base camp, and through the streets of Kathmandu on a motorcycle that I didn’t really know how to drive very well.”

Last spring, Ben Ayers ’99 found himself 300 feet off the ground, tethered to a cliff in Nepal’s Hongu River Valley. As he tried to operate a video camera, the largest honeybees in the world buzzed around him.

Ten feet away, his friend Mauli Dhan Rai hung from a bamboo rope ladder, skillfully detaching  the bees’ hive from the cliff. Inside was what is known as “mad honey,” whose hallucinogenic properties make it valuable internationally.

The dangerous work was part of an ancient tradition, and Ayers and a documentary film crew, trying not to spin out of control on their ropes, were capturing it on video for the very first time — the culmination of years of trust-building groundwork by Ayers.

Aging honey hunter Mauli Dhan Rai, on his last honey hunt, climbs a bamboo rope ladder toward a beehive on a cliff face. Below him, a team lights a grass fire whose smoke disorients the bees. (Renan Ozturk)

A significant voice for sustainable development in Nepal, Ayers is the executive director of the , whose focus on long-term, community-driven development has made the nonprofit one of the most effective in Nepal.

Ayers befriended Rai nearly a decade earlier, and over the years Ayers and dZi had worked on several projects in Rai’s village, Saddi. Nearly from the moment Ayers met Rai, he wanted to film the honey hunter. “I kept going back to that tiny village to win his trust, to be able to make the film,” Ayers says.

And after “literally years of conversations and negotiations” with Rai, community members, and local shamans, Ayers and his team did gain their trust and, finally, approval.

By then, Rai was older — 58 at the time of the filming — and less willing to do the dangerous work of harvesting beehives. So when Ayers and a National Geographic-backed production crew set out to follow a honey hunt, they knew it could very well be Rai’s last.

The resulting film was The Last Honey Hunter, released in 2018. Ayers returned to campus in early May for a screening in the Benjamin Mays Center.

Honey hunter Mauli Dhan Rai winces as bees sting him during the harvest. (Renan Ozturk)

The years of conversations and engagement that made the film possible are the same long game that makes dZi so effective, especially following Nepal’s 2015 earthquake. Many aid organizations there and elsewhere work in the short term, bringing in food or goods during a crisis. dZi on education, sanitation, and infrastructure for at least nine years at a time.

The approach is to “trust the people who need help,” Ayers said. “Let’s trust that the poor know what they’re doing. We’ve created different systems of helping people overcome poverty through their own intelligence and through their own methodology.”

The Hongu River Valley, where Rai lived and harvested honey, is one of the most remote in Nepal. When Ayers first visited Saddi, it was a week from the nearest road. The Kulung people who inhabit the area live primarily off subsistence farming, with few means to buy and sell goods.

“There are great challenges to being in this life,” Ayers said. “Poverty, sickness, being seven days away from a doctor, are very serious things. But also what you see in these communities is that there’s a need for people to rely on one another.”

Wearing bee suits, Renan Ozturk and Ben Ayers ’99 prepare to capture Mauli Dhan Rai as he harvests a valuable hallucinogenic honey from a cliffside in Nepal’s Hongu River Valley. (Renan Ozturk)

Harvesting mad honey was an important source of income for some community members and for Rai, who Ayers said had a difficult life and was not highly regarded in Saddi.

In fact, though a team supported him in the effort, Rai was the only one allowed to actually harvest the hives, according to the Kulung’s animist tradition. Kulung religious practices reflect a deep connection to the land: A creation story recounts how the first man descended from a nearby mountain peak, and the people believe in a multitude of forest spirits.

“For the Kulung, the whole pantheon of human existence is within their viewshed,” Ayers said. “These are people who are very connected to their land, and they’re connected to the spiritual world that comes out of their land. Shamans travel in between this sort of esoteric world and the human world that we live in.”

It was only with the approval of a particular spirit, given through a dream, that one was allowed to harvest honey. Rai had the dream as a teenager and had harvested honey ever since.

Ben Ayers ’99 has spent most of his working life in Nepal. He is the executive director of the dZi Foundation, whose focus on long-term, community-driven development has made the nonprofit one of the most effective in Nepal. (Courtesy of the dZi Foundation)

(The honey itself causes hallucinations, along with vomiting and diarrhea. “There are better ways to spend a weekend,” said Ayers, who has tried it himself.)

Twice a year, Rai and his team of helpers performed a ceremony with a shaman and then journeyed to the cliffs, where Rai would spend three days cutting pieces from the hives. He sold the honey and beeswax to a local trader, who passed it out of the village and Nepal.

It was exhausting, dangerous work, and by the time Ayers was trying to make a film, Rai knew his honey-hunting days were winding down.

“These are people who are very connected to their land, and they’re connected to the spiritual world that comes out of their land.”

Ayers returned to the village periodically over the years, getting to know Rai and his work better. In that time, the roads got closer and the outside world more accessible, so dZi’s goals shifted from poverty alleviation to adaptation to change, Ayers said.

Ben Ayers ‘99 poses with honey hunter Mauli Dhan Rai. (Courtesy of the dZi Foundation)

The people in the village, many of whom were initially afraid of disturbing the spirits in the forest, also warmed to the idea of a film crew accompanying Rai on a honey harvest. Rai himself liked the idea, but “he didn’t think I could do it,” Ayers said. “He didn’t think we could get ropes up there, that we were weak.”

But whenever Ayers returned to Saddi to check on dZi’s projects, “I’d meet him, and talk to him again. And I’d go back and talk to him again,” he said. “It was over that long course of time that he and I became friends, and I was able to gain access.”

Finally, in 2017, The Last Honey Hunter was a go.

Reflecting on his early work in Nepal, Ayers admits that “there was a part of me that very much wanted to be the white savior.” He liked spending time in Nepali communities, and he wanted to be the one solving their problems.

An English major at �ֲ���ý and “one of the Outing Club kids,” Ayers first went to Nepal during a study-abroad program.

This Himalayan country is a popular trekking destination, and trekkers hire local porters to carry their gear. Ayers became interested in the porters’ lives and even tried to become one for a short time, he told the audience at the �ֲ���ý screening.

“It was a real revelation for me to realize that the people I was walking with, these porters who had so much less than I had ever been given, had the same intellectual wealth that I did,” he said. “They had the same depth of experience and emotion that I did.

“While it sounds obvious, to get that sense was deeply influential in how I saw the world and how I saw people. I wanted to learn more about that, and I felt it was important for me to figure out a way to give something back.”

“By spending 10 years partnering with communities, you start to do these figure-eights, with one project morphing into another.”

After graduation, Ayers started Porters’ Progress, which advocated for porters’ rights. For years he went back and forth between Maine and Nepal, working in farming and forestry to fund his trips.

He found that swooping in with aid was not only wrongheaded, it was next to impossible. In the early 2000s, Nepal was in the throes of a civil war, with government forces controlling the trekking areas and Maoist rebels controlling rural areas like the Hongu River Valley. Because the porters lived in the country but worked on the trails, they were among the few who could pass between the two territories.

Interested in the experience of porters who hauled gear for climbers, Ben Ayers ’99 started Porters Progress after graduation. (Photograph courtesy of Ben Ayers)

So when Porters’ Progress got a grant, it solicited ideas from the porters on how to spend it, trained them in community development work, and sent them into otherwise-inaccessible communities to carry out the work.

“They proved themselves immediately,” Ayers said. “We were the only organization that was able to work through that situation. That premise of handing over control of the process to the locals is the philosophical basis of the work that we’re able to do.”

Ayers expanded that philosophy when he came to dZi, first as Nepal country director and then as executive director.

dZi’s work usually starts out with one project — sanitary toilets, a school building — but “solving” one problem tends to reveal many more. And one project cascades into others.

Ben Ayers and the dZi Foundation help communities in Nepal, like the village of Saddi, with sustainable, grassroots development projects. (Courtesy of the dZi Foundation)

For example: “We do a lot of sanitation programs, building toilets,” Ayers said. “We’ve also pioneered a lot of this technology called ecosan, which is when the toilets recycle urine. You separate the urine out, and that acts as an organic fertilizer. Super cool.

“Then we have all this fertilizer, and now the communities are interested in agriculture. Agriculture leads to cash-crop farming, and cash-crop farming leads to the need to have savings and loan cooperatives.

“For us, by spending 10 years partnering with communities, you start to do these figure-eights, with one project morphing into another.”

That, Ayers said, is how you make a sustainable difference in rural communities while empowering the communities themselves.

A side benefit is that you have enough time to persuade a hunter of hallucinogenic honey to let you make a movie about him.

The team that made The Last Honey Hunter — and produced a magazine piece — included director Ben Knight; Renan Ozturk, a climber and filmmaker; writer Mark Synnott; and Ayers.  

Making the film was “intense,” Ayers said. His team and Rai’s team trekked 12 miles through steep jungle terrain in monsoon season, crossing a river on a homemade bamboo bridge. Then they followed Rai up the cliff to the hives.

In this image, a camera is attached to a bamboo honey pole held by honey hunter Mauli Dhan Rai as he and his assistant Asdhan, right, cut a hive from the rock. With no safety system, they cling to the vertical wall with one hand while harvesting the honey with the other. This was Rai’s last harvest. (Renan Ozturk)

At first, the filmmakers, dangling freely from the cliff, spun around on their ropes too much to get good shots. The solution was to hang two people from the cliff at once, one acting as “ballast” so the other could stay still long enough to film. Ayers himself made high-angle shots.

The film crew also interviewed them and other villagers and captured intimate shots of daily life in Saddi. The result is a documentary that’s as much a reflection on Rai’s life as it is an adventure story.

“Mauli is the last one in his village who’s had the dream, and he’s too old to harvest,” Ayers said. “The whole narrative flow of the film is wondering who else could do it after him. He’s the last honey hunter.”

The first place Ayers screened the film was right in Saddi. The Last Honey Hunter has since been shown at several festivals and it won an award at the Camden (Maine) International Film Festival, qualifying it for an Oscar nomination.

In the film, Rai reflects that his position does not bring honor in the village. Life in Saddi is also still hard, Ayers said. dZi-guided programs have addressed nutrition and sanitation, but life expectancy is still relatively low, and healthcare is distant.

The harvest that Ayers’ team filmed was indeed Rai’s last. He died in May, shortly before the �ֲ���ý screening.

“I’ve been fortunate to be able to understand him and know him and be known by him, and be trusted enough to be with this story and be able to share it,” Ayers said.

“Mauli likely is the last honey hunter in that community, and for me to be able to bring him back to �ֲ���ý, where I feel very strongly my own story began, has been a real privilege.”

Rebecca Herzig

In a year of and , Plucked, by Johnson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies Rebecca Herzig, has hit at least one end-of-year list, The Economist‘s best books of 2015.

The book, by The Economist last February, is a “curious account of hair-erasing, and why people have tried clamshell razors, lasers, lye depilatories, tweezers, waxes, threading and electrolysis to try and free themselves from hairiness.”

has praised Herzig for this “smart and engaging” social history that examines the “insidious repercussions and political currency” of all those hair-removal practices, “which reverberate as loudly now” as when those practices began in the West 200 years ago.

Plucked has had a remarkable 2015 run. It’s been reviewed some 20 times in the mainstream media, and Herzig herself has been interviewed, has written articles on the topic, or had the book excerpted in nearly two dozen media outlets.

Ben Ayers ’99

A feature story in Bloomberg Business spotlights the work that Ben Ayers ’99 is doing as the Nepal director of the nonprofit dZi Foundation, a development group focused on rural communities.

Titled “,” the story by Abe Streep focuses on Ayers and dZi as a way to contrast sustainable vs. short-term relief efforts in Nepal after the April 2015 earthquake.

Ayers and dZi focus on helping communities by, for example, rebuilding schools to “develop the kind of prosperity that can make a community more resilient when it’s confronted by natural disaster.”

Ayers, a magna cum laude English major at �ֲ���ý who has worked in Nepal for much of his post-graduate life, tells Street that it’s “easy to drop off some tarps and call it good. I think this is more effective.”

Ben Chin ’07

National and local media offered to the Lewiston mayoral race, in which Ben Chin ’07 lost a Dec. 8 runoff election to incumbent Robert Macdonald.

The New York Times said the race was a “,” describing Chin as a well-organized and well-funded “activist with the liberal Maine People’s Alliance” and noting that the conservative Macdonald was a “Vietnam veteran and former police detective, who did little campaigning.”

The Bangor Daily News noted that it’s “,” where a large population of immigrants from African countries has made the city, according to the Times, “younger and more racially diverse than the rest of Maine” while noting that these new citizens’ political leanings are left-leaning compared to the aging population of longtime residents.

Amy Bass ’92

Another manifestation of Lewiston’s diverse racial makeup (and, some would say, a true harbinger of the city’s future) came last month when the Lewiston High School boys soccer team won the state title.

Amy Bass ’92, a professor of history at the College of New Rochelle and a frequent media contributor on issues around race and sport in U.S. society, noting that the Lewiston team has players from Congo, Kenya, Turkey, Germany, and Somalia, reflecting the influx of immigrants over the last 15 years, playing alongside teammates whose families have much longer roots in Lewiston.

“Seven members of the championship team came from the same refugee camp,” she writes. “They knew each other before becoming classmates and teammates.”

In recent years, Lewiston has “grappled with its identities,” Bass writes. “It has not, by any means, been a painless transition.” Youth soccer, she writes, “has been a microcosm of that process.” In fact, “it would be tough to overstate the importance of soccer in these community relations.”

A film about the Lewiston soccer team’s triumph by Ian Clough, a 2001 Lewiston graduate and former soccer player:

Lisa Simpson (�ֲ���ý ’20?)

It’s a communications strategy that you learn in kindergarten: When teased, respond with humor.

In the Dec. 6 episode of The Simpsons, Lisa Simpson’s solar-powered car stalls during an alternative-energy car competition. She gets teased with, as said, “strangely specific insults” that suggest that she’s doomed to, in order, �ֲ���ý, Maine winters, and Division III basketball.

“But rather than lick its wounds over the slight, the college decided to own the joke,” .

The college and Facebook channels along with an invitation to Lisa to apply to �ֲ���ý.

“Cute gesture,” the Chronicle said, “and a fun use of the college’s social-media platforms.”

View slide show: The Wedding Gift

Kirsten Walter ’00 and Ben Ayers ’99 didn’t register for traditional wedding gifts — eschewing the deep-sided pie dish, $17.99 at Macy’s — but instead asked friends and family to contribute to a barn-raising at their ca. 1800 farmhouse in Leeds, Maine.

The photo below and slide show at left show the gift being given. For two days prior to their Sept. 15 wedding — held in the completed barn — scores of family and friends, including some three dozen �ֲ���ý alums, gathered to raise the frame and enclose the new building.

The raising culminated weeks of framework that commenced in earnest when barn designer Brad Morse ’99 arrived in August. He, along with Ayers and father-son neighbors Bruce and Nat Bell, formed a core team that cut the hemlock, milled the timbers at Bell’s farm, and cut the frame behind the brick farmhouse.

Ben Ayers '99 hammers pegs on Day One of the barn-raising as neighbor Kevin Hudner, an experienced timber-framer, steadies the beam.

As the gift of time, expertise, and funds grew large, the couple got uneasy about not being able to give back, “other than some homemade jams,” says Walter with a smile. Guidance came from two mentors, Gloria and Gregg Varney of nearby Nezinscot Farm, who said this: “Asking for help is the biggest way to build trust.”

The truism resonated with the couple, whose careers involve building communities by building trust — she as founder of the urban-agriculture nonprofit Lots To Gardens, he as project director for the dZi Foundation, serving Himalayan communities. “We decided to accept everything that was happening,” says Walter, “and to feel incredibly honored by the trust, community, and friendships it helped us build.”

By H. Jay Burns

Ayers is the force behind Porters’ Progress, a non-profit organization that provides empowering education and apparel suitable to harsh Himalyan conditions to mountain porters in Nepal. �ֲ���ý is one stop on a U.S.-Canadian tour that Ayers is making with his 90-minute presentation, which includes a slide show and the award-winning BBC documentary Carrying the Burden, a 2001 Banff Mountain Film Festival selection.

A creative writing major at �ֲ���ý, Ayers spent a junior semester in Nepal. In that country known for stunning natural beauty and harsh poverty, he started working with the porters who accompany tourist treks in the Himalayas. Moved by the hardships that these hardy and hardworking people endure, he founded Porters’ Progress after graduation.

Not to be confused with the Sherpas famed for their role in newsmaking mountain climbs, the porters that Ayers supports are typically lowland farmers who augment a subsistence living by carrying luggage for tourist treks. In thin clothes and flimsy shoes, they spend weeks at high altitudes carrying up to 250 pounds. Their cargo baskets are strapped to their foreheads with a cord that distributes weight to the spine.

“There’s a certain brilliance to them,” Ayers says, “that I was amazed at in the face of such hardship.”

Ayers’ presentation is sponsored by the New World Coalition, the Anti-Sweatshop Coalition and Amnesty International.