Charity Taken to New Heights

"We encountered him at an elevation of over 13,000 feet on the fourth day into our climb.  He was wandering on the mountain.  He was wearing torn pants, a T-shirt and light sweater and open-toed sandals, if you can believe it.  It was surreal.

"I was so pleased that we found him when we did because he certainly would not have lasted the night.

"I've been an emergency physician in an Ontario hospital for 17 or 18 years, but I had such an emotional reaction to this - to finding this little boy in that environment.  It was so out of place to find a little lost boy there and he was so scared and so cold.  It was quite emotional."

Dr. Bjug Borgundvaag, emergency department physician, Mount Sinai Hospital

How fitting.  From Mount Sinai to Mount Kilimanjaro.  What else could it represent but an emergency, a small boy on his own, lost, in the final hours of surviving an encounter with death.  The sudden appearance of an emergency room doctor climbing Mount Kilimanjaro on a fundraising climb saved the child's life.  On examination, it was established that the frightened child was suffering from hypothermia and dehydration.

Sean Wisedale / Handout A porter hugs six-year-old Emmanuel, who was found lost and close to death on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro by a group of climbers from Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital. "He couldn’t survive another night,” says Dr. Bjug Borgundvaag, one of two emergency room physicians who treated him.

 

The climbing team of thirteen philanthropists, among them two doctors from Ontario and their porters took care to wrap the child into sleeping bags and a solar blanket, have him drink hot tea, and administered an electrolyte solution and high-carbohydrate food.  "He had been lost for three days and two nights.  Sent by his family to cut grass for their cattle".  

He became disoriented, lost his sense of direction and set about wandering in an attempt to find his way back home.  He had traversed about 40 kilometres trying to find help.  A six year-old child in Tanzania.  No supplies, no shelter.  The nighttime temperature drops there on the mountain to -10C.
"If that boy had not been found then, he would be dead for sure.  He couldn't survive another night."

"It looks a bit like the Moon.  There is no vegetation; it is barren, rocks, stone, all lava rock.  It is a dormant volcano."  Seven hours after the child's rescue a porter carried him down the mountain, leaving him at a police station where people there began work to reunite him with his family in the village of Moshi.

The climbing adventurers, most of whom had managed to summit the 5,l995 metre-high mountain  in Tanzania were successful in their enterprise, raising over $1.3-million to benefit Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.