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Remember Josh Foote? The intrepid Mortgage Choice team leader we wrote about in January, who vowed to take on Africa’s highest peak in the name of charity? Well, he did.
Last year, Foote, an infrastructure team leader, boasted to work mates that he would happily climb a mountain for a good cause. His co-workers took him up on it, and six months later the urban Australian found himself in a group of 15 climbers, eight guides, four cooks and 37 porters at the base of Mt Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania in a high-stakes effort to raise money for Ronald McDonald House.
“It was amazing – I’ve never done anything quite like it in my life,” says the 32 year-old, who says he’s still feeling slightly dazed since arriving home earlier this week.
“Food was pretty average though,” he laughs, “It’s a lot of high-energy, high-carb stuff like fried eggs, some not very nice sausages and stale bread. It gave me a bit of food poisoning on the last few days!”
#pb# Foote describes how, on the final day and a half before reaching the summit, he recalls spending a harrowing night ill, sore and shivering in a frozen tent – but says it was completely worth it in the end.
“You start at 3,600m on the summit night and you do an 8-10 hour hike to the final camp. If you’re unlucky like me and get food poisoning, you get woken up at midnight and rush to the toilet by torchlight on the ice. Then you go from 4,600m to the top (roughly 5,900m) on the final day.
Foote describes the moment he reached the summit as an intensely emotional one, the culmination of seven days-worth of sweat, sore muscles and some of the most spectacular vistas –“it’s a bit like being on the moon” - to be found on the continent.
“You spend the night cold and annoyed that you’ve got food poisoning. Then sunrise hits and you go from being annoyed to seeing the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen in your life. They say you’re going to cry and you don’t believe them, but then you struggle to the top and you just find a rock to sit down on and bawl.”
To date, Foote’s tremendous effort has raised $4,180 for Ronald McDonald House and he says he’s continued to be amazed by how generous the broker network has been – and continues to be.
“I went through hell to get to the top, but the people I did it for; they go through hell for a lot longer than that.”
To help Josh Foote reach his ultimate goal of raising $5,000 for Ronald McDonald House, click here
