Holly Morris

Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine

Holly Morris, after years of working in a desk kind of job in publishing decided to quit her job, staked her career and savings and set out to prove that adventure is not just a vacation style but a philosophy of living and to find like-minded, risk-taking women around the globe. That's how Adventure Divas was born. Morris biggest obstacles were: she had never worked in television (she doesn't even own a set), and she needed lots of cash. Jeannie, her warm and spirited mother who had worked in a production firm, supported her and provided her expertise in her work. With modest backing, a small television crew, her spirited producer-mother, Jeannie, Morris began with her production. Holly Morris turns her Gen X restlessness into a personal mission. "Your generation was promised a decent husband and maybe a job on the side," Morris tells her mother. "Mine was promised jet packs."

She decided to track down women of action, film their stories and bring it out to the public all over the world to empower women. She traveled all around the world to seek out "divas": women creating positive change in their societies through passionate and often convention-defying actions. Among her subjects: the first female beat cop in India - Kiran Bedi, New Delhi's chief of police, who revolutionized India's infamously brutal Tijar Jail with her humanitarian ethic,; an Iranian publisher of a feminist magazine fighting strict censorship laws; a pop star who rocked New Zealand's cultural divides; blind folksinger Pari Zanganeh, who wears a hat instead of a veil, in Iran, Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther and social activist and now a fugitive living in exile in Cuba; New Zealand pop star Hinewehi Mohi, a Maori who reinvigorates her native culture for a new generation; and Mokarrameh Ghanbari, a septuagenarian painter and rice farmer who lives in the tiny village of Darikandeh on the Caspian plains of Iran where her creative talents run counter to the government's strict stance on art--are thoughtful and probing. Morris experiences while she narrates the work of these divas reveal the differences between their lives and those of American women. According to her, these women "were risk-taking, grassroot leaders - artists, activists, politicos - women who were making change on micro and macro levels around the world." With these women as the focus, Morris and her crew provide novel and extensive explorations of different cultures.

Along the way, Morris herself becomes a certified Adventure Diva, as she hunts for wild boar with Penan tribesmen in the jungles of Borneo, climbs the Matterhorn short-roped to a salty fourth-generation Swiss guide, and memorably becomes the first woman ever to enter the traditional camel race of the Saharan oasis town of Timia and she won it. With her win, she motivated other women for the achievement and success

I like the way Morris's has shared her writing in a storytelling journalistic flair. I was impressed by this motive. I like the central idea of her book, going to different places in search of the divas. Being from a developing country, which is entrenched in the poverty and illiteracy, where people are exploited and fight for their rights just to earn a meagre amount of living, there are so many women who are fighting for the social causes but their work does not get exposed to the large masses. It is essential to bring those women in popularity so that other women can get motivated and challenged. Along with describing other women whom she interviewed, when Morris becomes her own subject, she has expressed herself so honestly "I have to lay my hands all over something to understand it; burn myself to know it's hot," she writes. "Being in motion, not knowing what's going to happen next, not only suits me, but has become an unlikely vehicle for faith." Morris's self-deprecating wit, sense of pacing and brainy insights into the nature of fear and self-reliance hold the book together.

And she was so hilarious in book at times. In Borneo, at a tribal longhouse decorated with shrunken human heads, she slips off to the primitive powder room to apply "Bobbi Brown's Brillant Ðo Lиvres Raspberry Shimmer #8 lipstick" as per her producer's request. She drops her pocket mirror down the squatter toilet hole. Unflappable, she digs in the sewer and retrieves it. The interesting part is she is more concerned that if she will let her pocket mirror down the sewer line this might creates problem for thousand of people living in that village. Morris is a feminist and a realist. Later that same trip, she's lost in the jungle after being separated from the tribesmen who have taken her to hunt wild boar.