Xolile Ndlovu
I am 20 years old and am part of an extraordinary project. The project is called Summit My Kilimanjaro. We are running this project as an entrepreneurship project for Life College. “SMK is our biggest obstacle and our biggest opportunity” one of our team members would say and I fully agree with him.
We see the mountain as a metaphor for summiting our personal limitations. We can get to the highest peak in Africa; we can most definitely conquer anything.
Now this may sound very adventurous and glamorous (not really), putting together a project of this size was a lots of hard work. We had the idea two years ago; little did we know that it would take us this long for the project to launch.
The project has sub projects, namely operations, finance, marketing, sales and fitness. Each team members is responsible for their respective sub project. We had to raise the money for the project.
We were fortunate to have Supersport come on board and agreed to shoot a documentary of the climb and gave the advertising around the documentary to trade for sponsorship money. It took us a year and a half to raise R500000, get our footwear sponsored, exercise and dietary and to actually get ready for the climb.
We had slumps in the project and lost four members. These were really difficult times. We had moved our deadline twice and we were very close to having our project canceled.
I learnt a lot about patience and resilience. Tenacity can go a long way and so can listening. I have learnt a lot about myself and how I relate to people. I learnt that I have breaking points and so do other people.
I am very happy to say that we leave for Kilimanjaro on the 1st of March 2008. I am more excited than ever! I cannot wait, but I am also very nervous, that I might forget a tooth brush or something…ha ha.
I look forward to climbing Mt. Everest next!
