Two Bay pupils summit Africa’s highest peak
IT WAS a tough, icy lesson in resilience and tenacity for two Port Elizabeth Grade 11 pupils who summited Africa’s highest peak as part of the President’s Award For Youth Empowerment programme.
St Dominic’s Priory High School pupils Matthew Roy, 17, and Marcella Bekker, 16, who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania during mid-July, this week did not mince their words about the challenges they faced.
“It was tough, really tough. There were many times we wanted to give up and the biggest lesson we learned at the end of it all was just to keep going,” Marcella said.
Marcella and Matthew were referring to the five-and-a-half days of strenuous hiking it took their 12-member group – which included one of each of the pupils’ parents – to ascend the nearly 6 000m peak and the one-and-a-half days it took to descend.
“At the bottom of the mountain, the scenery and weather is tropical. As you get higher . . . it’s like a desert and then it’s just rock. After that you are walking past ice and on rock until you get to the top,” Matthew said.
Marcella, who said she had acquired a new appreciation for oxygen after the “oxygen-starved hike”, said her biggest challenges were the hours of walking in silence “because you can’t breathe” and the icy temperatures, which plummeted to -15°C at the top of the mountain. “We were just concentrating on walking, just putting one foot in front of the other,” she said.
Matthew’s biggest challenge was hallucinations in the thin air. “They really played with my mind. At the end, it was just mind over matter to get to the top,” he said.
Both pupils said, however, that they did not regret the climb and were proud of their accomplishment.
“We did it for our school . . . We took a flag with the St Dominic’s emblem all the way to the top,” Marcella said.