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Teamwork in Tanzania Farlington girls renovate Kinole School
Lorraine Leivers, mountain guide, Iron Woman competitor and all-round inspirational woman, once again led Farlington girls and staff into East Africa. This summer, 21 Farlington students and three teachers joined the expert expedition leader from specialist company True Adventure for an expedition in Tanzania. Just as in Zambia two years earlier, the brief was to experience the real country, meet the people, do some meaningful work alongside local people and then have some rest and relaxation. A few hours after breaking up from school, the team landed in Dar es Salaam. We spent a night in a hostel before heading off on a long bus drive south to the Uluguru Mountains, where we were due to trek up a 2200 metre high mountain. Although stunningly beautiful, the mountain range looked very daunting in the morning light the next day. Backpacks were shouldered and on day one of the trek we climbed to 1000 metres where our guides awaited us in the base camp hut. The climb was hard but there was lots of laughter and encouragement from all members of the team. The path to the bottom of this mountain had begun almost two years earlier, in October 2013, when the trip had been launched on the back of the highly successful Zambia Expedition, also led by Lorraine and True Adventure. On that chilly October evening, the girls had committed to raise £2800 each by July 2015. The months between the two dates had been filled with evening and weekend jobs, dog walking, lawn mowing, mucking out of numerous stables, raffles and more cake sales than you would believe. Regular meetings ensured the group stayed focused on their goals and together as a team. Excitement built throughout the final academic year, via a Training Weekend on the South Downs, a leadership conference for the staff and a very, very, very wet day spent climbing the Three Surrey Peaks in February. All that seemed quite literally a world away as we sat outside our tents halfway up a Tanzanian mountain, with a
Women undertaking hard physical work. stunning valley vista below us and the rest of the mountain behind – and above! Food has rarely tasted so good as our simple meal that evening. Everyone turned in for an early night with the hardest part of the climb yet to come. A fundamental part of the True Adventure philosophy is that the students run the trip. They make all the decisions, handle all the money, buy the provisions and fulfil all the management roles. This process began back in Horsham on the day of departure. Each day was run by a student leadership team, developing crucial decision-making skills, along with people management, diplomacy, negotiation and some very tricky maths at times, when the exchange rate in a country differed from what we had expected. Leadership skills came to the fore on that second day which saw the team triumph at the peak, over 2200 metres above our starting point the day before. A sudden mist rolled in to prevent us actually seeing just how far we had climbed, but our legs told us exactly how far we had come! Ironically many people, especially the ‘elderly’ amongst our group, found the descent harder than the ascent: older knees do not bend as well as young ones. Now truly operating as a team, we headed off via another long bumpy road journey to our project site. Kinole is a quiet, isolated village at the foot of the Uluguru Mountains. The school of 1,050 students and just 19 teachers is at the heart of the community. Muslim and Christian families live and study
Spring 2016
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