User:Ibrahim Husain Meraj/Maria Conceição

Maria Conceição (full name: Maria Do Ceu Conceição, born 23 May 1977) is an humanitarian, athlete, the first Portuguese woman to summit Mount Everest and the founder of the Maria Cristina Foundation.

Early life
Conceicao was born in Vila Franca de Xira, Portugal and is the youngest of eight. She spent her childhood in Avanca, district of Aveiro, where she lived with her biological mother until the age of two and was then adopted by Maria Cristina Alves da Cunha Matos, an Angolan refugee with six children of her own.

Move to Dubai
Conceicao left Portugal at the age of 18 to seek employment in Switzerland. She soon moved to the UK, where she worked in hospitality. In 2003 she successfully passed a job interview with Emirates Airline and moved to Dubai shortly after receiving the offer to start her new career.

Humanitarian work
On one of her regular flights Conceicao had a 24-hour layover in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she first came into direct with abject poverty while passing through a slum. “Living in Dubai, we forget what life is outside of this,” she says, honestly. “[After the Bangladesh trip] I tried to go back to my routine. I went to the supermarket to buy a Häagen-Dazs ice cream and I remember clearly, it was AED21 ($5.70). In Bangladesh AED21 buys 21 kilos of rice. I couldn’t eat that ice cream and I thought, ‘I’m not going to live like this’.” Once back in Dubai, Maria started to collect donations from her friends and colleagues in Dubai and took them to Dhaka as often as possible. She soon realised that handing out donations will not solve the problem and came to the conclusion that only education can lift the slum-dwellers out of poverty. With donations given mainly by people in Dubai, Conceicao managed to open a school in the slum, where 600 students were enrolled.

Impact of financial crisis
When the financial crisis hit in 2008 things started to deteriorate as funding ran dry. The school kept running until 2013 when it was shut down. At the time, there were about 400 students enrolled, who were now forced to drop out of formal education due to lack of funding. Many children were forced to get married, many started to work in garment factories, some committed suicide. Conceicao turned to private schools in Dhaka, who would be able to continue providing the same level of education that her school had given to the students. After a year of talks, Cambrian School and College agreed to admit the remaining 131 students at discounted rates.

Maria Cristina Foundation
The main goal of the foundation now is to raise funds to cover the school fees for 131 students while ensuring no student is forced to drop out due to lack of funds. The charity is currently registered in the UK, USA and Portugal and raises the majority of its funds from the general public across the world.

Becoming an athlete
Desperate to raise funds to cover the costs of running the charity, Conceicao turned to endurance sports. She trekked to the North Pole in 2011, but did not raise the amount of funds she hoped for. Thus, in the same year, she started training for another challenge: walking 7 marathons in 7 emirates in 7 days and became the first woman to do such a challenge. This resulted in some sponsorship deals and donations for the charity, but was still not enough to keep the charity running.

Summiting Mount Everest
Maria Conceicao started training for the climb in 2012. She trained at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering in India for a month, summited Mount Elbrus, Aconcagua, Mount Kilimanjaro and attempted to summit Denali before attempting Mount Everest. She became the first Portuguese woman to summit Mount Everest on Tuesday, 21st May 2013. Summiting the highest mountain in the world did not bring the funds Conceicao had hoped for, so she went on to reinvent herself as a long-distance runner.

Guinness World Records
Conceicao has thus far been awarded six Guinness World Records for her running efforts:


 * 1) The fastest time to complete an ultra marathon on each continent (female) in 41 days, 3hr, 23 min and 39 sec
 * 2) The fastest aggregate time to run an ultra marathon on each continent (female) in 46 hr, 11 min, 10 sec
 * 3) The most consecutive days (7) running an ultra marathon by a female
 * 4) The fastest time to run a marathon and ultra marathon on each continent (female) in 1 year, 24 days, 7 hr, 2 min and 40 sec
 * 5) The fastest aggregate time to run a marathon and ultra marathon on each continent (female) in 80 hr, 8 min and 3 sec
 * 6) The fastest time to complete a marathon on each of the seven continents by a woman in 10 days, 23 hr, 30 min and 40

Swimming the English Channel
Still exploring new avenues for raising funds and awareness of her charity work, Maria Conceicao attempted to swim the English Channel on the 30th August 2016. Having learned to swim a year before, Conceicao took on this challenge after training for less than a year. The swim had to be aborted after 7 hours due to very strong currents.

Awards and recognition

 * 1) Most exceptional and Innovative European Woman of the Year, 2007
 * 2) Emirates Woman of the Year, 2009
 * 3) Emirates Humanitarian Woman of the Year, 2009
 * 4) Voted Ahlan Hot 100 Entrepreneur in UAE, 2010
 * 5) Most Inspiring Woman of GCC by Kraft, 2010
 * 6) Special Mention for Child Welfare by Petrochem, 2012
 * 7) Sustainable Leadership Award, 2013
 * 8) Inspiring Change Award (International Gulf Organisation), 2014
 * 9) Humanitarian Woman of the Year by Inspiring Women Belgium (runner up), 2014
 * 10) Louvor Nobre Casa de Cidadania, 2014
 * 11) Cidadão Nobre Portugal, 2015
 * 12) Cosmopolitan Female Role Model, 2015