I climbed Mount Everest for AVID
My name is Rosalind. I’m 8 years old and live on a farm in Devon. I’ve just finished climbing the equivalent of Mount Everest on our stairs at home with my Mum and sister, and people are going to sponsor it for AVID. You can still sponsor me on JustGiving here.
I got the idea when I saw an advert on the TV about some children doing the same thing. At the time my House Group at school was named after Ranulph Fiennes and he climbed Mount Everest. So, I just wanted to give it a go.
I learned that he went up halfway and had to go back down because he had a heart attack. Then he went back up again, so it’s like he climbed it twice!
We were thinking of what we could raise the money for, and then Mummy explained what AVID was. I thought, that’s quite a good cause! We should send the money to them!
We also thought with coronavirus it must be really difficult for people in detention centres.
It’s bad enough for everyone else. Then you think, we might be struggling with coronavirus, but there are people who are getting less support than normal and need it even more at the moment.
So we thought it might be a really important time now for the money to go to AVID.
We had to do 8,848 metres and our stairs are 4 metres so we had to do 2,212 flights of stairs. Which is a lot!
We usually did ten flights a day, but twice I did fifty in one day and that was very tiring. Even though my sister and my Mum helped, I think I did most of the stairs myself!
We kept a tally on the blackboard and we added loads of colourful drawings to celebrate the numbers as we went.
To get people to support us Mummy texted as many people on her phone as she could. All our friends, aunties and uncles and Grandpa and Grandma and a few other people.
If I didn’t really want to do it, I took a break. When I did it I really enjoyed it, it was kind of a tired, panting sort of “enjoy”!
It helped us sometimes when we were bored and we thought “Come on let’s go and do some stairs!” Bracken the dog even started doing it with us. And my sister Natasha who is 4.
It was like a rainy day game, except not a game, a challenge.
We celebrated when we got to 1,000 flights, which is basically the halfway mark. Then when we realised we had two flights left I was so excited. I went up and down twice and we finished the whole lot and we were very proud.
I’ve been at home most of the time. And luckily when we were doing the Everest climb we didn’t have home learning yet, so that didn’t get in the way at all!
It was tiring, but it was also very satisfying at the same time.
I would just like people in detention to know that we are thinking of them and trying to understand what it must be like for them in their own version of lockdown.
