Kaka being the Swahili for brother, not the Brazilian footballer getting in some pre-World Cup high altitude training.
The day before we set off I had my most stressful day in Arusha so far due to my aforementioned brother forgetting his phone, getting lost in Arusha, a car breaking down, driving that same broken car for the first time, going out for a meal and then getting back to find that Nick had then lost his keys and couldn't get back into his room, so we had to drive the broken car again to the restaurant (getting stuck in a banana grove en route) to search for the keys and question local taxi drivers whilst being mobbed, and not finding them, so Nick spending the night on the sofa awaiting the early rise of my landlady to explain the situation.
Not exactly ideal pre mountain climbing conditions. But luckily O-S's are tough, so after a slightly late departure whilst a fundi broke into the room, we set off.
What I hadn't quite appreciated was the small army involved in helping 2 Mzungu climb a mountain. We had 2 guides, a cook, a waiter and 6 (yes, 6) porters. This all seemed a little excessive to me, but it turned out I was wrong. These porters are unbelievable. They carry their own backpacks on their backs, and then additionally to this they carry a further load either on their head or balancing on their neck. Apparently new laws have come in restricting the weight they can take to 20kgs each, which I am quite glad about! It was previously 32kgs.
I realised my first mistake as soon as we reached the gate to the Machame route. I had not brought a day pack. For some reason, in my mind, the porters would be walking at the same pace as us, and if you needed anything you would just be able to get it. This is not the case. The porters set off after you each day as they need to take down your camp, and then run up the hill in order to be at the next camp ahead of you to set up before you arrive and greet you with some Chai.
So not having a small pack was somewhat troublesome, to everyone but me, anyway. Nick had to carry some of my bits in his pack, and the guides had to carry the rest. How to start off as Miss Popular!
That aside, we started off relatively quickly after paying the (extortionate!) park fees.
Scenery-wise, the walk is interesting as you climb up through several 'zones' from rainforest at the bottom, to Arctic desert at the top. As each hour passes you find decreasing signs of life, and it happens surprisingly quickly, presumably a testament to the steep angles that you are taking. There wasn't much in the way of wildlife, however, with the highlight being an eagle that was circling our camp one day. We heard Colobus Monkeys, but couldn't see them, and other than that there were ravens, robins and one mouse.
According to the guides, the way to make the summit was to walk pole pole (slowly), drink 3 – 4 litres of fluids a day and eat as much as humanly possible. We were both good at the first point, I excelled at the drinking of water, and Nick relished the guilt free eating. That along with altitude sickness pills to get us up the mountain, and a bit of luck with the weather, and we made it pretty easily.
Most days were relatively steep, but not difficult walking other than one descent down a waterfall, and although we had gone for the 7 day option to try and ensure success, it was fairly obvious that we would have been fine doing it in 6. We didn't have any particular aches or pains, but I guess 4 months marathon training for both of us earlier in the year will have provided us with some decent endurance training.
The hardest part of course was summit day. They wake you at 11.30pm for a midnight ascent after some tea and biscuits. Nick (again, thank you!) came appropriately laden with energy bars and gels and we set of with our headtorches glowing. We weren't the first to leave the camp that night, but we slowly but surely reached and overtook the other climbers. It may sound good, but I would rather have either gone slower or set off later and then not have had to wait around on the mountain getting cold in case we made it to the summit too early.
The main difficulty of the ascent was the cold – real high ski resort kind of cold, but with very little activity to keep your warm. I was dressed as perfectly as I could have been (the day before the guides check out your clothing for suitability) with fleece thermal leggings, cargo pants and then ski pants, and on top, a long sleeved thermal, a thin fleece, a think fleece and a ski jacket, two pairs of gloves, one of them skiing and 3 pairs of socks.
I think Nick maybe overdid the layers, against the advice of the guide and seemed to spend a lot of time playing about with his clothing.
So despite all this clothing, the bitter cold still penetrated and by the top my feet were numb, painful blocks and my fingers too.
Reached the summit after nearly 6 hours walking at 5.55am, well before sunrise! It was pitch black when we got there, and our photos are a testament to this, but after a bit of jumping around and singing Bob Marley songs daylight finally arrived and we could scurry down, taking photos from the roof of Africa as we went. We watched a couple get engaged at the top, and then passed several groups still making their way up, not looking very happy at all. You don't really know what to say – it seems slightly patronising to say 'nearly there' with a big smile on your face, but we tried our best.
What they don't tell you about in advance is the descent back down to last nights camp. What took you 6 hours to climb in darkness takes 1hour 45mins to run down (yes, run) afterwards. They literally fall / run down the mountain, a much steeper route than you came up, along scree. They claim it is the only way to do it, but it didn't really align with my western ideas about the best way to come down a mountain. However, I went along with it as best I could and as much as my scared-i-cat-ness would allow. So whilst Nick was the first to reach the summit that day, I was the first back at camp, and very happy to get some of the layers off and wash the dust off my face. A weirdly timed brunch followed and then a further ascent to the next nights camp and a very early nights sleep.
The most impressive injuries we have to show for our adventure are a nasty bruise on my leg for me, some comedy hand sunburn for Nick and a really quite impressive odour from both of us after 7 days with no washing facilities and limited clothes.
My god, did I enjoy my first shower when I got back home! Unfortunately for Nick – as I think I may have been a little greedy with the hot water. After a lunch of Kuku and chipsi and a celebratory slice of (European style) cake, we were back to normal.
Check out the photos!
Tuesday, 22 June 2010
Monday, 21 June 2010
Kili Photos - Part 2
Getting closer!
Taking five.
Another amazing sunset.
Closer still.
Amazing what these guys can carry and how. Maasai use their heads, Chaaga use their necks, Mancunians use their backpacks.
Nick pondering the weather.
Me practising my high altitude camouflage techniques.
Desert or Mountain?
Precarious – to the left you can make out the track we have spent the day walking along.
Dinner is served.
5.55am - Made it, but looklike the altitude may have had an affect!
Mzungu and guides all happy, but kind of wishing the sun would come up soon so they can go back down.
Sunrise from the top of Africa.
Probably worth the walk for sights like this.
Daylight arrives, time to run down the mountain - literally.
The traditional "happy we now have our tips" dance.
Thursday, 17 June 2010
Kili Photos - Part 1
The Rainforest zone. Wet.
First peek!
Nick keeping warm on the first night
Porters carrying gear up the hill, possibly not a job I will be considering.
Sunset from our tent
Simply stunning
Food
I get on with the food here very well, though I'm not sure my waistline agrees. Lack of food is not a specific problem in Arusha as the climate and soil are very good (due to many local volcanoes) and it gets a lot of rainfall. So whilst, as with everywhere in the world, there are those that go without, and clearly a balanced diet is still hard to achieve for most, actual lack of bulk food is not an issue for the majority.
The 2 staples are Wali and Ugali, Wali being white rice, Ugali being some kind of stodgy polenta dish. Breakfast is Uji, a kind of porridge but not like at home, it has no substance to it and is instead a thick gloopy starch type drink.
Of these I only really like Wali. I have tried with Ugali, and will continue to, but there really isn't much to it. They love it here though.
Wali na Maharage is my favourite, definitely the way Mama Lydia cooks it. Rice and Beans, the Wednesday dish and the beans are cooked in a kind of coconuty sauce, delicious.
Wali and meat is also popular, though the rice far outweighs the meat.
I had a local stew the other day which was meat and banana. These are the bananas whilst they are still green and savoury. Again the bananas far outweighed the meat, but it was tasty. Most dishes come with greens, which tend to be very salty and I'm not entirely sure what they are, and carrots feature highly.
Another staple, at the moment at least, is Parachichi, avocado, which I am currently eating everyday in one form or another. They vary quite a lot, with some being very watery and some being much nicer and richer.
Eli's mum cooked me some food – fried bananas, boiled sweet potato and hot milk straight form the cow. Very good, but also a huge amount and very filling, so I let him have the lion's share. She also gave me some bananas for the road and we picked some parachichi up off the track, so I went home with quite some booty. Can you die from an avocado to the head? I hope not as it is a real danger at times.
All portion sizes in the local cafés are enormous, particularly of the the Wali and Ugali and I am frequently amazed to see people polish it off.
I've probably already mentioned the sugar issue – every drink has at least 5 teaspoons of sugar in, hot or cold, so I am trying to stick to water where possible, though after home visits from 9am til 3pm without a break, you do just sometimes need a hit.
Everything else is fried. 'Bites' include chapati, samosa, deep fried flour, deep fried flour and sugar etc. Actually, they do have boiled or roasted maize which women cook and sell on the street which is probably the healthiest option. Unfortunately nowhere near as good as sweetcorn, but a bad lunch substitute.
To give you an idea of prices, a bunch of bananas is 500 Tsh (25p), a roasted maize 300 Tsh, a chapati 200 Tsh and a meal of Wali Maharage or chicken and chips in a cafe 1500 Tsh. Beers are 1500 Tsh for a 0.5l bottle in a bar, weirdly they are 1400 in shop, so the bar is making practically nothing.
Then there are the high end restaurants, where prices are similar to the UK (well, the North anyway) with a cheese omelette being 8000 Tsh in a nice cafe in town. Cheese is very rare though, so it is occasionally worth the splurge.
The 2 staples are Wali and Ugali, Wali being white rice, Ugali being some kind of stodgy polenta dish. Breakfast is Uji, a kind of porridge but not like at home, it has no substance to it and is instead a thick gloopy starch type drink.
Of these I only really like Wali. I have tried with Ugali, and will continue to, but there really isn't much to it. They love it here though.
Wali na Maharage is my favourite, definitely the way Mama Lydia cooks it. Rice and Beans, the Wednesday dish and the beans are cooked in a kind of coconuty sauce, delicious.
Wali and meat is also popular, though the rice far outweighs the meat.
I had a local stew the other day which was meat and banana. These are the bananas whilst they are still green and savoury. Again the bananas far outweighed the meat, but it was tasty. Most dishes come with greens, which tend to be very salty and I'm not entirely sure what they are, and carrots feature highly.
Another staple, at the moment at least, is Parachichi, avocado, which I am currently eating everyday in one form or another. They vary quite a lot, with some being very watery and some being much nicer and richer.
Eli's mum cooked me some food – fried bananas, boiled sweet potato and hot milk straight form the cow. Very good, but also a huge amount and very filling, so I let him have the lion's share. She also gave me some bananas for the road and we picked some parachichi up off the track, so I went home with quite some booty. Can you die from an avocado to the head? I hope not as it is a real danger at times.
All portion sizes in the local cafés are enormous, particularly of the the Wali and Ugali and I am frequently amazed to see people polish it off.
I've probably already mentioned the sugar issue – every drink has at least 5 teaspoons of sugar in, hot or cold, so I am trying to stick to water where possible, though after home visits from 9am til 3pm without a break, you do just sometimes need a hit.
Everything else is fried. 'Bites' include chapati, samosa, deep fried flour, deep fried flour and sugar etc. Actually, they do have boiled or roasted maize which women cook and sell on the street which is probably the healthiest option. Unfortunately nowhere near as good as sweetcorn, but a bad lunch substitute.
To give you an idea of prices, a bunch of bananas is 500 Tsh (25p), a roasted maize 300 Tsh, a chapati 200 Tsh and a meal of Wali Maharage or chicken and chips in a cafe 1500 Tsh. Beers are 1500 Tsh for a 0.5l bottle in a bar, weirdly they are 1400 in shop, so the bar is making practically nothing.
Then there are the high end restaurants, where prices are similar to the UK (well, the North anyway) with a cheese omelette being 8000 Tsh in a nice cafe in town. Cheese is very rare though, so it is occasionally worth the splurge.
Shika
For the past week or so I have been spending more time than previously on Shika, that charity that many of you donated money to in the spring.
Hopefully I explained it well at the time, but if not, Shika (to hold) is a charity set up by a women in Brighton who used to live here, for vulnerable children. It is an after school centre that is meant to provide some food, education, emotional support and fun for the children most in need.
The last part raises several questions, two being, who is most in need, and how do you find them, and what are they in need of? These are the questions that we have been trying to answer this week.
Who is most in need? That's a difficult one as obviously there are many people in need. Probably the most in need would be those children who aren't attending any school at all, but that raises the obstacle of how you find and identify those children, so we have had to start in a school.
We took the whole register of class one and two and narrowed in down in several ways. The teachers identified those who are either single or double orphans and we added them to the list, we chose those who are getting the lowest grades in the two classes as that is an indicator that even if there are no further problems, there is further need for educational help and obviously it is an indicator that there may be underlying issues. Also we asked the teachers generally about the children, who misbehaves, who is very quiet, who are very poorly turned out etc etc. So from these 3 sources we had a longlist of children to interview.
Stage 2 was talking to each of the children in the school. I did half of these interviews (about 30) with Edward (the Maasai teacher from Shika) translating for me. Questions asked would range from 'what is your favourite subject' and 'what do you want to be when you leave school' (my favourite reply to that being 'President') to 'do you live with both your parents' and 'is there anyone at home when you get back from school'.
Varying answers to these questions meant we could further narrow it down to a shortlist, though not much narrowing was done. Hopefully this is because the first stage was successful in identifying those children who need our help most, rather than an indication that the majority of children at that school need our help.
Stage 3 was home visits. For each of the children on the list we have sent home a letter to their parents informing them that some visitors from the school would visit them the next day, and could they please be at home to facilitate this. This is obviously a big ask when you have a job and several mouths to feed, so the number of parents who did do this was overwhelming. We didn't want to specify who we were and what Shika does, as it is not unheard of for parents to borrow a neighbours house in order to appear to be in a worse situation than they actually are, and also because we can't offer the support to all the children and to have the idea of support that never actually materialises is not good.
So for the past two days and tomorrow we have been doing these visits. It involves me and Edward and a teacher from the school traipsing around town with several children in tow. I didn't realise that the children would come with us, but addresses don't exist in the same way as they do at home, so we wouldn't actually be able to find the houses otherwise. It did mean the children being out of school for the whole day though, which no one seems to think is an issue.
The school has been amazingly cooperative, which several teachers giving up a lot of their time, and one in particular, Sarah devoting the whole week to us. She is a pretty amazing women in general.
The home visits were obviously something entirely new to me, and very far outside my comfort zone. People here are generally very welcoming and pleased to see you, and pleased that you are taking an interest in them, but the subject matter of the visits was very personal and at times upsetting. This meant that whilst no one became aggressive or unhelpful, it could become awkward and upsetting for everyone.
Some of the stories are really heartbreaking, as you can imagine. Some people have so little yet still manage to survive day to day. Hopefully the centre will make a tangible difference to the children and also their families.
The second question was, what are they in need of. It is easy when doing these visits to get caught up in comparing the wealth and living conditions of each (do they have electricity, do they have water, are they all living in one room) etc, but then you also have to consider who Shika is there to help, and it is not just those living in poverty. We are also trying to provide a basic level of education, so even the children who had apparently better home lives than others, but were attaining very poor grades are those that we want to help.
So the final question, and the one we haven't yet answered, is how do we run the centre in terms of addressing those needs. Do we have different children on different days who have differing needs, such as those who are falling behind at school on one day, and those who are likely to need more emotional care on another, or split them by school class and see to individual needs as they arise.
So that is what I have been up to. Quite a learning curve and definitely an eye opener. It's a great time to be here in the initially stages to be able to help set it up and have an important role to play, rather than merely volunteering at an existing centre. There are no other volunteers here at the moment, so it is quite full on.
Very glad I came here.
Hopefully I explained it well at the time, but if not, Shika (to hold) is a charity set up by a women in Brighton who used to live here, for vulnerable children. It is an after school centre that is meant to provide some food, education, emotional support and fun for the children most in need.
The last part raises several questions, two being, who is most in need, and how do you find them, and what are they in need of? These are the questions that we have been trying to answer this week.
Who is most in need? That's a difficult one as obviously there are many people in need. Probably the most in need would be those children who aren't attending any school at all, but that raises the obstacle of how you find and identify those children, so we have had to start in a school.
We took the whole register of class one and two and narrowed in down in several ways. The teachers identified those who are either single or double orphans and we added them to the list, we chose those who are getting the lowest grades in the two classes as that is an indicator that even if there are no further problems, there is further need for educational help and obviously it is an indicator that there may be underlying issues. Also we asked the teachers generally about the children, who misbehaves, who is very quiet, who are very poorly turned out etc etc. So from these 3 sources we had a longlist of children to interview.
Stage 2 was talking to each of the children in the school. I did half of these interviews (about 30) with Edward (the Maasai teacher from Shika) translating for me. Questions asked would range from 'what is your favourite subject' and 'what do you want to be when you leave school' (my favourite reply to that being 'President') to 'do you live with both your parents' and 'is there anyone at home when you get back from school'.
Varying answers to these questions meant we could further narrow it down to a shortlist, though not much narrowing was done. Hopefully this is because the first stage was successful in identifying those children who need our help most, rather than an indication that the majority of children at that school need our help.
Stage 3 was home visits. For each of the children on the list we have sent home a letter to their parents informing them that some visitors from the school would visit them the next day, and could they please be at home to facilitate this. This is obviously a big ask when you have a job and several mouths to feed, so the number of parents who did do this was overwhelming. We didn't want to specify who we were and what Shika does, as it is not unheard of for parents to borrow a neighbours house in order to appear to be in a worse situation than they actually are, and also because we can't offer the support to all the children and to have the idea of support that never actually materialises is not good.
So for the past two days and tomorrow we have been doing these visits. It involves me and Edward and a teacher from the school traipsing around town with several children in tow. I didn't realise that the children would come with us, but addresses don't exist in the same way as they do at home, so we wouldn't actually be able to find the houses otherwise. It did mean the children being out of school for the whole day though, which no one seems to think is an issue.
The school has been amazingly cooperative, which several teachers giving up a lot of their time, and one in particular, Sarah devoting the whole week to us. She is a pretty amazing women in general.
The home visits were obviously something entirely new to me, and very far outside my comfort zone. People here are generally very welcoming and pleased to see you, and pleased that you are taking an interest in them, but the subject matter of the visits was very personal and at times upsetting. This meant that whilst no one became aggressive or unhelpful, it could become awkward and upsetting for everyone.
Some of the stories are really heartbreaking, as you can imagine. Some people have so little yet still manage to survive day to day. Hopefully the centre will make a tangible difference to the children and also their families.
The second question was, what are they in need of. It is easy when doing these visits to get caught up in comparing the wealth and living conditions of each (do they have electricity, do they have water, are they all living in one room) etc, but then you also have to consider who Shika is there to help, and it is not just those living in poverty. We are also trying to provide a basic level of education, so even the children who had apparently better home lives than others, but were attaining very poor grades are those that we want to help.
So the final question, and the one we haven't yet answered, is how do we run the centre in terms of addressing those needs. Do we have different children on different days who have differing needs, such as those who are falling behind at school on one day, and those who are likely to need more emotional care on another, or split them by school class and see to individual needs as they arise.
So that is what I have been up to. Quite a learning curve and definitely an eye opener. It's a great time to be here in the initially stages to be able to help set it up and have an important role to play, rather than merely volunteering at an existing centre. There are no other volunteers here at the moment, so it is quite full on.
Very glad I came here.
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