in f o c u s by Mallor y Ar nold
From Dancing Shoes to Hiking Boots Irish dancer-turned-thrill seeker
Like many Dublin kids, Sara Sarafa was inspired to begin Irish dancing after going to the Dublin Irish Festival when she was 7. She developed a passion for performing, dedicating six days a week to training all the way up until her final performance at the end of her senior year of high school at Dublin Jerome. Sarafa credits Irish dancing for her everyday perseverance and determination. “I feel like that’s where my value of work ethic came from,” she says. “The instructors teach you respect and how to work hard on things. I owe a lot to them.” Sarafa had no idea that one day she’d trade her dancing shoes in for hiking boots and scale the tallest free-standing mountain in the world, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. She laughs when reflecting that she used to spend hours getting her hair and makeup ready for dance performances, but years later, during her climb up the mountain, she didn’t shower for a week. But hygiene aside, surprisingly, Sarafa finds many similarities between the two passions. “I really enjoyed the aspect of dance being individualistic but also working as a team,” she says. “Climbing the mountain was sort of the same thing because you go with a team to get to the top. It’s the same camaraderie I had growing up.” 16 • February/March 2021
All those years being attentive to footwork helped with climbing, too. “While I was climbing, I focused on making deliberate steps one after the other,” Sarafa says, “and while I’m not pointing my toes all the way up the summit, I’m constantly thinking about what my feet are doing every step of the way.” Good Morning, Let’s Climb a Mountain For most people, merely the conversation of taking on a record-breaking mountain might sound both terrifying and daunting. But for Sarafa, it was just another phone call from her brother David Sarafa in 2019. “I had been in kind of a slump looking for something else to get up and do,” she says. “Since dancing ended, I really hadn’t found a new hobby.” David called her one morning to announce he was going to Africa to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in three months and asked if she would like to go with him. Sarafa jumped on the opportunity. Sarafa says to prepare for the climb, a lot of people will go to lower-level mountains to practice. But since she lived in Michigan at the time, she used the StairMaster at the gym and wore hiking boots and a weighted backpack. She and David weren’t alone, though, as both their spouses came along for the feat. Sarafa and her husband Daniel and David and his wife Kelly all attended Dublin Jerome and were high school sweethearts. www.dublinlifemagazine.com
