Family Challenge 2012

This weekend my mom, two brothers, a friend of the family's, and I did the family challenge (my dad was in England for work)! The family challenge is an event that raises money for Kamili Trust, which helps people with mental disorders. This year it was announced that 3 million shillings had been raised with our help! We donated around 30,000 shillings to this cause, and the event happened from September eight to ninth. This money will be used to help train nurses, build clinics, and much more.

Poster for the Family Challenge 2012

The family challenge consists of a number of fun activities in which the teams all compete in. Some examples of challenges are: planting a tree, transporting water from one bucket to another without using your hands (you had to hold ropes), figuring out math problems as a team, etc.

This year our team name was Lionhearts (again). We arrived in Sanctuary Farm in time for lunch on Saturday, and then collected up our lists of instructions, put up our huge tent, and got to work! Our first challenge was tree-planting, which we all thought we did reasonably well at. Five more challenges followed this one, each taking about 15 minutes, with 15 minutes time to reach the next activity.
We camped in Sanctuary Farm overnight. There were many other families that we knew competing, for example some friends from ninth grade. During the night there was a jazz band playing (which was amazing!) and a big barbeque.

The next morning we had breakfast at around 6:30-7:00, there was a briefing and then the challenges began once more. We started off with the painting challenge, in which I was blindfolded and had to paint a sunset with my team's instructions! We ended the day with the water challenge, which consisted of crossing a swamp using planks!

We had an hour to take down our tents after this, and we managed to pack everything into the land-rover before lunch began. There was then an awards ceremony, which recognised the people who had contributed most to the event and who had helped organise it, the challenge winners, best family team, the people who raised the most money, and the overall winning team. We won a challenge and got a medal and a funky white t-shirt!
After we ate we drove back home, satisfied with what we had achieved.

I really wanted to make a difference when doing this, and I was glad that I achieved this while still having fun and enjoying myself in the process. This challenge taught me a lot about the Kamili trust, and about teamwork and responsibility. It showed me that to succeed in life you have to have support, both from yourself and from others. This fundraising activity will help me with this skill in life, and allow me to spread the word about this foundation and what people with mental disabilities are going through.

I can't wait to participate in the family challenge again next year!!

(The link to the Kamili website: http://www.kamilimentalhealth.org/index.html )