As I climbed higher and higher and the air became thinner and thinner, the bond I was making with my mountain guide Frankie was only just beginning even though it had seemed like I had already know him for years. Let me backtrack to how this all began; in a place my favorite teacher Ms.Quinlan or “Q” affectionately called “the North 185 hole” (English classroom).  In my freshman year she was planning a trip to go back to Tanzania to teach English to a group of orphans with her childhood best friend and fellow teacher. She had ventured there the previous year to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with another fellow teacher, and that’s where she met the intrepid Frankie Suruali, or Frankie Pants. She described him as the male version of herself and needless to say they instantly hit it off. She would tell us stories of how Frankie could climb the entire mountain bottom to top and back down again in a single day, when it usually takes someone seven, or how he could do pushups on his thumbs. Frankie quickly became this superhuman in the eyes of my English class, and little did I know that in two years from then I would be summiting that same mountain with Frankie by my side.
      

When Q announced she was planning a third trip to Tanzania at the end of my sophomore year there was no question that I wanted to go. After she assembled the perfect team of eleven students, three teachers, one father, one step-mother, and a step-brother we started to fundraise for the trip of a lifetime. By the time the trip actually rolled around in June 2014 we had raised over $10,000 for the Kilimanjaro Orphanage Centre and the Mount Kilimanjaro Porter Society. On the second day of the trip, after our long jet lag recovery sleep we finally met Frankie and all the other guides, porters and cooks who would be joining us on our expedition up one of the world’s seven summits. It was a very surreal moment when I saw Q running and screaming “Frankie Pants!” Jumping into his arms for a warm embrace three years in the making.
    

Flash forward to our third day on the mountain, we had just finished the most elaborate lunch possible at 13,000 feet and we were continuing on our ten hour trek for the day. I had made my way to the front of the pack up with Frankie; I started a conversation about Bob Marley because that was what had been playing quite loudly from his pocket radio. As soon as we started chatting we never really stopped until we made it up and back down the mountain. Frankie was there on summit day to motivate me to never quit, to just follow his footsteps, and have them lead me through the darkness all the way up to 19,341 feet, to dig deep and keep climbing because pamoja tunawesa “together we can.”