US pair ends Africa charity walk 6 months early
HARTFORD, Connecticut (AP) — An American woman who walked through Africa for 18 months says she has ended her charity trek six months earlier than planned.
Amy Russell, 24, and her walking partner Aaron Tharp, 26, were the last two standing from a journey that was supposed to include about 10 people. They endured malaria and brushes with wild animals in their walk to call attention to the lack of access to clean water in developing countries. They raised about $10,000 for charity: water, a New York-based group that funds drinking water projects.
Health problems and political unrest in their planned destination of Egypt caused them to stop their walk, said Russell, founder of the charity Walking4Water. They plan to fly home on Sunday.
“I guess ‘officially’ we ended in Negele, Ethiopia,” Russell said via Facebook chat from Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. “Random town ... but the point where everything plus people throwing rocks at us every day just, where we decided to be done.”
Most of the other would-be walkers backed out before Russell’s journey began in South Africa in February 2012. A third member of the team, 25-year-old Marty Yoder, who had been driving the support vehicle, went home with health problems when the team was in Mozambique.
Russell, of Connecticut, and Tharp, of Ohio, camped or stayed with missionaries or local families, traveling north through South Africa, Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia.
Russell went through seven pairs of shoes and lost about 40 pounds (18 kilograms). She walked for 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers), stopping 2,000 miles short of her goal.
“The biggest challenge was probably just living in constant instability, we never stayed in one place very long,” Russell said. “So every day, we had to find food, had to find water, had to find a place to stay. Always dealing with a language barrier, always changing circumstances. Dealing with that mentally was probably the hardest.”
They had physical problems as well. Russell contracted malaria in Mozambique. They both got sick a number of times from drinking brackish water, and Tharp developed knee problems, Russell said.
They also spent one night in Kenya huddled in a tent with a machete after noticing lions in nearby bushes.
“Throughout the remainder of the night, we heard yet another lion, another elephant, a two-minute lion-elephant showdown, and a couple hyenas,” Tharp wrote on his blog. “Morning never looked so beautiful!”
But it was the people that Russell said will leave a lasting impact on her.
She recalled a day she spent in a Kenyan village, going with other women and children to gather water from a hole that was a 15-minute walk away.
“From this ‘puddle’, maybe you could call it a small pond, we filled the jerry-cans, and walked back with them,” she said. “This water, murkier than potato soup, was what they drank directly from, without any fears or qualms.”