The Sponsorship

Just to make life easy for anyone who just saw the page title and wants to sponsor us without reading any of the crap I write here is the link:-

http://www.justgiving.com/PaulandDarinaKilimanjaro

And thank you very much :-)!

We had never intended the journey up Kilimanjaro to be about raising money for charity, I was actually incredibly against it. This is going to be an incredibly difficult trek and the additional pressure of feeling that I had to complete it (and potentially killing myself enduring altitude sickness) to raise money for a charity was something that really didn’t appeal! When I had been researching doing the trip there were a few charities that would pay for you to trek Kilimanjaro if you would guarantee that you would raise a few thousand pounds in sponsorship, I really didn’t want to spend time asking people to sponsor me and then chasing people for money afterwards…….

So with all that in mind I would like to introduce you all to the latest member of our team, Louise Fowler.

Great picture isn’t it? There were plenty more complimentary ones but I decided against using any of those.

Louise works with us and is great fun, she also represents the local Multiple Sclerosis Therapy centre to help raise money for them. She asked me about getting sponsorship for the centre a while back but I really didn’t want to for all of the reasons mentioned above.

However…. While doing some more research on Kilimanjaro and trying to find out about other peoples experiences Darina found a link to this blog and sent it through to me:

http://aquavista.wordpress.com/2009/08/

We both found this blog to be a fantastic read, it is the blog of a guy called Chris who completed the trek up Kili in February this year (2010). His story gave me some great information on what I can expect on Kili and what I need to take there. If you have time I really recommend that you read it and if possible donate to his charity as well (after donating to ours first though :-)).

The part of his story when he was climbing the final part towards the summit and the motivation that he had to continue for the people that has sponsored him incredibly inspiring.

So after another talk with Louise we agreed to do the trek for charity. Since then Lou has been fantastic, we set up the Just Giving page at the top of this post and since then Lou has emailed the link out to her friends and family and is also working to get the link on the email address signature of people at work who deal with customers and suppliers as well as getting publicity from the local newspaper.

Hopefully this blog will be interesting for some people too and generate some more sponsorship and interest for our charity.