Why does someone climb a mountain? Why am I climbing Kilimanjaro? These are questions we have all asked ourselves and don’t really have an answer to. With 10 women doing this with me – it’s not about a personal challenge of “I must get to the top at all costs” it’s more a case of “I’m really looking forward to the fun I’m going to have with my friends over the next nine days, and hopefully we will all summit.”
Yes, there are tons of challenges: the extreme cold, the sun burn, keeping cell and camera batteries charged, and the lack of oxygen and altitude sickness. In spite of these variables, we like to believe that we are well prepared. We can say with confidence that we have discussed (at length), analyzed and discussed some more various details in our preparation. Should we take Diamox as a prophylactic for altitude sickness? Should we share or have tents to ourselves? What extra snacks will work best? How much of each type of vitamin should we take? Which shoes and clothes are the best…
On one of our walks the other day we tried to define the actual purpose of this trip – an adventure, not really; a holiday, definitely not; a sight-seeing trip, no; so we settled on a: “THING.” Central to this is the people. As with any challenge, I can relate this back to our team at SYSPRO too who deal with the continuous complexities that come with ERP implementations – with the right group of people, enough preparation and assuming the right attitude, we are ready to embark on any journey. This at times will call for testing the relationships and indeed testing one’s own tenacity.
Anyhow one thing is for sure – we will be talking a lot, we will have fun, and hopefully most of us will summit.
And so for now… Onward and upward we tread!
PS. I have an additional tool in my armory – SYSPRO’s Tenacious Ted, who will be accompanying me, and encouraging me every step of the way 🙂
Follow Louise and the teams progress climbing Kilimanjaro
