What's your why?

Last night, our fabulous friend and fellow climber Dr. Kiki Marx hosted a beautiful gathering for the Kili team. We had two of the "tribe" celebrating birthdays and in typically thoughtful Kiki fashion, she had bought Franjelica's cupcakes and lit birthday candles. As we relaxed and caught up over hot bowls of soup and bubbly glasses of wine, we were suffused with a sense of well-being, belonging and excitement.

Our intrepid tribe leader Robyn had another treat for us - she had invited Brad Shorkend founder of Urban Everest Lateral Thinking, a dynamic organisation defying simple characterisation to give us a presentation. Brad develops - people, ideas, corporations, organisations, communities. He sells dreams and his currency is something he calls "infectious action" transacted by acquiring and mastering thinking processes. We were lucky enough to have him share his experiences of his own Kilimanjaro climb in December 2010 for the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation with tennis legend Martina Navratilova.  There isn't enough space to describe in detail how important Brad's time with us was. He gave us specific, practical advice from what and how to pack gear and snacks, to the mountain  - it's terrain and temperamental weather conditions. He gave us invaluable insight into the minutiae of camp life and the porters and guides who will be our support system and life line on the mountain. We were in turn amazed, terrified, inspired. We became emotional watching other people's successes and contemplating the disappointment of strangers. When Brad showed us a photograph of Stella point, a spectacular shot of the climbers resting in snow, against a backdrop of a blue sky with the light of day bursting in a star of promise around them, just 45 minutes from Uhuru peak and the summit, there was an audible collective intake of breath.

Stella Point

Brad ended his presentation with a challenge to each of us, to contemplate the personal whys of our journeys. Some of us have explored these to an extent and even written about them. For many of us, the why is a profound intangible, escaping neat definition.

Although I think I have many personal whys, I can certainly trace one of them back to a function I attended last year and as is so often the case with me - it all centred around food.

I am known amongst my friends and family as being a lover of food. I profess to love everything about it from buying new recipe books and reading them like eagerly awaited bed-time stories to planning menus and sourcing their ingredients. I frequently post my weekend menus onto my Facebook profile - purely for the joy of sharing the abundance that is the world of beautiful nourishment. Yet, I will admit to feeling that creeping dread when I am faced with the last chore of the day - packing my children's lunch boxes. One of the things I have told friends I love most about school holidays is that the monotonous burden - and it feels like a burden - of packing school snacks and lunches is temporarily lifted. A momentary reprieve which I relish in favour of haphazard and spontaneous nibbles when the mood moves and the appetite dictates that it is indeed feeding time.

Last year, my husband and I along with some of our friends and about 400 other members of our community attended a fundraiser for an organisation called Yad Aharon, in particular support of a project called Ohr Natanel. An outreach organisation dedicated to providing food for impoverished families, the Ohr Natanel project specifically raises funds for children's lunch boxes. The fundraiser involved a dinner - a three course affair replete with soup, perogen, salad, choices of chicken and beef and an array of seemingly never ending desserts and a talk by one of my favourite authors Joanne Fedler (more about her later).

At the start of the evening, the organisers screened a DVD compiled for the event. In it, an anonymous recipient of the charity spoke about how she would try and prioritise the payment of her bills over grocery shopping. Her rent was covered, sadly food was not. I thought back to just that morning when I had gone shopping at Woolworths. I had bought fruit: naartjies and bananas and paw paws and pineapples. I had bought lettuce: crisp cos; soft butter and an Italian mix with peppery arugula, mild red tip leaf, frilly endive, radicchio, curly leaf lettuce. I stocked up on cucumbers (English and Israeli) and tomatoes (baby rosa and heirloom). For my children's lunch boxes I made sure to pick up several packets of baby carrots, baby corn, sugar snap peas and mangetout. For my husband I picked up Fuerte avocados, bean sprouts, grated beetroot, baby spinach. We needed cheese - so I bought silky Danish feta and crumbly organic feta. I bought plain low fat cream cheese and plain low fat cottage cheese, and cream cheese rolled in tomato and herbs and cottage cheese with chives. The kids had eaten all the yogurts so naturally I stocked up on 6 packs of smooth fruit yogurt and plain Bulgarian and a couple of yogurts with stewed fruit or black cherries or shaved coconut or some other indulgence.

In planning dinners for the next few evenings I included potatoes (orange fleshed sweet potatoes, and Mediterranean and baby potatoes), a pack of plump baby marrows, round gem squash, vibrant pumpkin and for a new butternut laksa soup I wanted to try - the requisite butternut, lemon grass, fresh limes, curry leaves, coriander, coconut milk and a new bottle of Chinese 5 spice. For my morning toast I picked up an oat and honey loaf (delicious with unsalted butter - oh we needed more of that too), a soy and linseed loaf and a low GI brown health loaf. At the till, I handed over my credit card and didn't think twice - except perhaps to shake my head in vague annoyance that it would be me packing the damn lunch boxes AGAIN! And so, it was no surprise that when I heard a woman admit that she had to make a choice between providing the roof over her children's heads or the food in their school bags I was reduced to guilty and not very lady-like tears.

Later when Joanne Fedler spoke a little about her journey with food, which prompted her to write "When Hungry, Eat", although I had read and loved the book, I appreciated both her and the writing on a whole new level. Hunger is not always about food. It is also about spiritual and emotional need. It is about being able to reach out to someone else, recognise another's emptiness and be willing to sit with your own sense of "less" in the pursuit of creating "more" for someone else. Sometimes G-d teaches us our lessons in gentle ways and sometimes we require a harsher hand. There are times when G-d makes us lose that which we take for granted in order to make us see what is really important and sometimes he allows us the far lesser task of watching someone else's brave struggle, while having the honour of filling out a debit order. That night I sat in a privileged chair, having paid for my dinner (all 3 courses of it). I got to go home and with love and gratitude prepare a salad for my husband and pack 2 lunch boxes filled with nourishing, colourful food. I was allowed to plan a menu that involved basmati rice and filo pastry and the following  morning when both my boys asked for seconds at breakfast I got to thank G-d from the bottom of my heart that seconds was always an option.

Amit celebrates his 6th birthday with a
decadent chocolate pinata cake

My husband is a gifted teacher - a vocation he loves desperately in a tough school where he is highly respected, committed to a profession not widely acknowledged to be well remunerated. I am thankful every day that I have a qualification and a profession that allows me to run a busy private practise which while leaving me tired and often overstretched, allows me the luxury of never ever contemplating whether we can have electricity or food, school clothes or winter pyjamas, supper or breakfast, petrol or school fees. If G-d forbid, I was ever faced with the terrible situation of having to raise my children by myself, I would be lonely, but I would pay the bills. When Robyn talks about the women she works with, the long hours for inadequate pay, the daily grind of a day quagmired in thankless pettiness and the constant juggle of anxiety and despair, I know that I'm partly climbing to provide them with some of what I've been gifted with. Independence.

If even one woman is trained through the envisaged Skills Academy, provided with an education, which leads to marketable skills and those translate into sustainable independence, then that will be the success of this project. I dream of a phone call from a woman who has been a recipient of Yad Aharon to the organisers to ask them to remove her  and her children off their recipient list and put them instead onto the donors list. This is the dream for which we are climbing. If this were to become a reality would it be the only reason for the climb? No. Would it be enough? I think so.

Amali 2 years, enjoying an abundance of summer fruit

by Tali Frankel