Steep hills, heavy backpacks, and a scary suspension bridge. These were the challenges for 12 President’s Award participants who stepped out of their comfort zones to finish the Mosslands Two Rivers Trail last weekend.
Steep hills, heavy backpacks, and a scary suspension bridge. These were the challenges for 12 President’s Award participants who stepped out of their comfort zones to finish the Mosslands Two Rivers Trail last weekend.
Organised by the President’s Award for Youth Development, a local non-profit organisation, the
event united learners from different backgrounds.
Six learners were from Grahamstown and the other six are from Walmer township in Port Elizabeth. “If you live in Grahamstown, you are so used to being in your own space and your own box, you always take things for granted,” said Tamani Chithambo from Victoria Girls’ High School (VGHS) who completed the trail.
Siyanda Makunga, also from VGHS, added that it was about the people, not the destination. Crossing the suspension bridge was particularly challenging. “I thought, what if I fall? I’m too young to die… but when you get to the end, it’s like yay!
I did this,” she said. “Grinning and bearing it,” was how Anna Nelson from Diocesan School for Girls (DSG) described the experience.
She also learned what could be done with limited resources. “I used my t-shirt to dry me, my pillow was my jersey,” she said.
The 30km trail outside Grahamstown is graded moderate to difficult. The President’s Award is affiliated with the international Duke of Edinburgh Award and organises non-competitive activities for youth aged 14 to 25.
The programme also sponsors youth at risk. The goal is to complete bronze, silver and gold levels through community service, skills and physical recreation.
A fourth component of each level is the ‘adventurous journey’, which often takes the form of a hike, and
is an opportunity to develop social skills and team work.
Operations Manager Janine Hansen, who led the hike, said it was “enormously rewarding”. She believes in getting youth actively involved and stressed the importance of young people from different backgrounds finding things that they like about each other, rather than focussing on differences.
“It’s just phenomenal to see how they sit together, eat together, laugh together and encourage each other,” she said about the two groups of learners.
Anna Nelson expressed her thanks to Hansen for helping the learners recognise what they could learn from the hike: “To appreciate what we’ve got, working together, and not having our own goals,” she said.
