Plant City resident John Zielinski is used to flat terrain as the linebacker for the Jesuit High School football team. This summer, he reached new peaks at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro.
Step.
You’re almost there.
Step.
You’re almost there.
John Zielinski looked up. Thousands of feet above him, he could see the top of Mount Kilimanjaro peeking through the clouds of Tanzania. At 19,341 feet, the dormant volcano is the highest mountain in Africa.
John, a 17-year-old Plant City resident and Jesuit High School senior, focused on the trail before him. He had been hiking with his father, John Sr., and a group of 30 other climbers for almost six days.
John adjusted his 15-pound pack and took another step. He had to see the view from the top.
It Takes A Village
A week before John found his feet planted on the mountain, he had been toiling below it, in a Maasai village hours away from the closest town. John was on a summer missionary trip in Tanzania. He and other missionaries had dug into a dirt floor of a local school. They laid rocks.
“Big, heavy rocks,” John said.
The rocks were to be the foundation.
Then the missionaries ran out. They thought the project would have to be scrapped. Instead, the local schoolchildren set out across the village to get more rocks, giving the missionaries enough to finish.
“Over the next few days, we started mixing concrete and cement,” John said. “Local leaders got involved and
before you know it, we have a classroom floor.”
In the children of Tanzania, John saw God’s love at work.
“They were very appreciative,” he said. “They would always try to help as best they could. They brought us the rocks, and they would go way off to get water for us to mix the cement. They wanted to help because they knew we were helping them, and they wanted to be part of it as well.”
John was invited on the two-week trip by his father, who first brought up the trip when John was in eighth grade.
“He really wanted to do it. I didn’t really think much about it, because you know, it was eighth grade,” John says.
But after his junior year at Jesuit, earlier this year, John begin to prepare for the summer trip to Tanzania. He knew the facts: HIV/AIDS is prevalent in the country, with over 1,472,000 living with the virus in 2012. The Tanzanian people live amid the risk of hepatitis A, typhoid fever, malaria.
But he didn’t anticipate digging holes for toilets, setting up showers — or just how challenging the climb to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro would be.
The Earth He Has Given
John has hiked part of the Appalachian Trail, a 2,200-mile range that runs from Georgia to Maine.
“That was nothing compared to this,” John said. “You could see the top of where we were going, and it seemed like it was so far away, that we would never — in one million years — get there. That was only day two. We were thinking, ‘Wow, we’ve already hiked this far and we’ve already suffered this much and we’re nowhere near where we need to go.’”
By day three, the terrain had turned rocky.
“After that, it was basically like walking on another planet. There was no life. We could see for miles and miles,” John said.
The top of Mount Kilimanjaro taunted him. He had been trekking for almost six days: eight hours per day.
Step by step John continued.
It was the night before the final day. John got a bad headache — the worst he’d ever experienced.
He popped some altitude pills and pressed on. He thought of his family — how he didn’t want to let them down. He thought of his football coaches at Jesuit High School — how he always pushed himself in practice.
Around him, other climbers were battling against their bodies and the elements too. One climber passed out.
When the climber woke, the climber had no idea where he was.
Another hiker John passed started losing vision and couldn’t see more than three feet in front of him.
Five more hours, the guides told them. Five more hours.
Step.
You’re almost there.
Step.
You’re almost there.
John looked up. There.
It was 7:30 a.m. He had reached the summit.
It was the sixth day of the climb, and the sun rose in front of him.
“This is what we’ve been planning for, this is what we’ve been suffering all this time for,” John said. “I learned that I can do anything I put my mind to if I put my trust in God. If I trust Him, then I know He’ll be with me.”
Contact Emily Topper at etopper@plantcityobserver.com.
