Everest adventure and charity rolled into one in Njambini

By Joan Barsulai

It is 4pm on Saturday afternoon at the Flying Kites children’s centre in Njambini. The sun is unusually blazing hot today, and two men, both drenched in sweat, are playing football with boys and girls as a handful of speculators cheer from the edge of the field.

As the game winds down, the children run in droves into the arms of the men, who lift some of them high up and walk out of the field as the others follow, singing and dancing.

Sibusiso Vilane, a South African mountaineer and Toby Storie-Pugh, a British adventurer and philanthropist based in New York, have come to Njambini to champion a common cause — charity.

They stand out in the way they have intertwined their sense of adventure with charity work.

Sibusiso came into the limelight in 2003, when he became the first black African to successfully summit Mt Everest.

Sibusiso ignored the great odds and abject poverty that constantly threatened to derail his plans as he focused on the prize. He has gone ahead to scale the ‘Seven Summits’ (the highest points on each of the seven continents on earth).

He has also set the world record by becoming the first black man to walk to both the South and North poles unassisted. Throughout many of his ventures, Sibusiso’s motivation has been his charity work.

Toby, on the other hand, was  inspired to change the lives of young people nine years ago, when he came across needy children while he was training in the hills of north India.

“It was the first time that I felt a real sense of mission,” he says.

The encounter inspired him to do something to change the lives of destitute children.

He decided to ride a motorcycle from France to South Africa to raise money to help such children from around the world. On his way, he stopped in Kenya and volunteered in Kayole.

Overcrowded homes
There, he worked at various children’s homes in the slums in Nairobi and discovered that these homes were overcrowded, and lacked basic amenities, such as running water, electricity, plumbing and furniture.

With this in mind, he was motivated to start an organisation that would not just house children, but also give them genuine opportunities.

He founded Flying Kites organisation with two close friends in 2008. The organisation, which is based in Njambini, South Kinangop, provides education opportunities to orphaned and destitute children from the area.

It currently houses 26 children, and educates and supports another 30 children from the local community.

Toby and his co-founders are now inspired to expand the home to accommodate 150 orphans, in small family units, each with two ‘house parents’ on the land the academy owns.

As part of a strategy to make this dream a reality, Toby started Expedition Everest to raise money through sponsorship, while simultaneously working towards enabling the first Kenyan to climb Mt Everest, the world’s highest mountain.

Expedition Everest, which was launched in March, started by selecting the right Kenyan candidate to climb the mountain in 2014. Sibusiso, who has always had a strong desire to see another African summit Everest, flew to Kenya from South Africa to help with the selection process.

“When I successfully summited the Everest in 2003, Nelson Mandela, our former president, declared that my achievements clearly sent a message to the world that Africa is now here, and what I had achieved put a stop to the monopoly by Canada, New Zealand and the USA, who claim that they are the only ones who can challenge the nearly impossible and triumph.

“This has truly challenged me to get more Africans on the Everest,” says Sibusiso.

Gruelling selection
Together, Toby and Sibusiso directed a gruelling selection process that saw Helen Kinuthia, 25, who is a physical education teacher, beat 180 applicants to be selected to join the team.

She becomes not only the first Kenyan, but also the first black African woman to attempt to climb the Everest. In clinching the opportunity, Kinuthia had to emerge first among the other challengers who climbed Mt Kenya in four days.

She climbed the mountain without much ado, a feat, Toby points out, that proved that she was “tough, fit and disciplined”.

Toby and his team hope to raise Sh40m during the course of this expedition, which is set to take place in March 2014.

In order to prepare for the climb that lies ahead, Toby and Kinuthia will be scaling a series of other mountains over the next two years.

The pair is under no illusions as to the scale of the task in front of them.

Historically, one in ten climbers don’t return from Everest and only by repeatedly testing themselves at extreme altitudes can these climbers build their skills and learn how their bodies react in the thin air and extreme conditions of the high mountains.

Kinuthia says she would relocate to South Korea to prepare for this trip of a lifetime.

“The winter there is one of the harshest in the world, and it will give me good practice and endurance in readiness for the expedition. I am optimistic I will achieve my desire,” she says.

Toby’s greatest motivation for doing this expedition, besides raising money for charity, is to inspire the Flying Kites children to live their lives with a sense of adventure — “going to university, starting a business, raising a family, climbing Everest, everything”.

“I would like the children to have an ‘Everest scaling attitude’ and not succumb to pressure to be ordinary, but to grab the opportunities and be great.”