View from the summit

PLYMOUTH - Approaching the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro last summer, the Rev. Mally Lloyd couldn’t help wondering what seven hard days of hiking had wrought.

There, atop the highest point in Africa, Lloyd found little of the peace and solitude she envisioned as she planned her sabbatical from Christ Church Parish Episcopal in Plymouth. Rather, dozens of parka-clad adventurers like her stood clustered about the frigid summit, jostling for the best photo opportunities.

Lloyd got her photo, but spent most of her chilly time atop Africa wandering about the edges of the summit, taking in the expansive views and pondering the big picture of creation.

Striations marking the ages in snowfields below, visible from 19,335 feet, reminded Lloyd of the different layers she’d seen in the rock walls of Oldupai Gorge, where humanity started. “You had to think, ‘I don’t think the world was made in seven days,’ ” Lloyd said.

The five-week trip to Tanzania, Kenya and Zanzibar last August and September led Lloyd to some unexpected conclusions. Some, like how the money spent to maintain the stately church back home could feed so many of Africa’s desperately poor, are still being processed.

Lloyd, who returned to lead the local Episcopal congregation in December, has begun to incorporate the lessons she learned in Africa in her sermons. It is an expansive task.

Lloyd received a grant from the Episcopal Church to visit Africa on sabbatical last summer. She originally planned a fact-finding mission to determine if Tanzania had the infrastructure to support new missions. She sandwiched trips to Mount Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti around the mission work, only to see the mission work postponed for a year.

Lloyd scrambled and found a mission in Kenya where she could work with native villagers instead. A side trip to the island of Zanzibar fell into place at the last minute.

Lloyd is no stranger to the rigors of a good hike. She and her family are veteran White Mountain visitors. And just a year ago she hiked to nearly 10,000 feet in British Columbia.

But nothing could truly prepare her for the high altitude of Kilimanjaro, a former volcano that rises into the clouds above the Tanzanian plains.

Lloyd enlisted her sister, Anny, for the adventure and started training. She returned to the White Mountains for overnights and climbed Mount Monadnock repeatedly. Back home, she hit the best slopes she could find, up the steps of Coles Hill and on to the top of Burial Hill, over and over and over again.

The 50-something sisters hit the 6,000-foot base camp at Mount Kilimanjaro with two native guides and five porters, a fairly typical entourage for an assault up the mountain. The trial, she recalls, was more like a super highway than forested path, with dozens of fellow hikers and their teams passing up and back.

Lloyd and her sister took their time, ascending Kilimanjaro in seven, rather than the more popular five days. The climb was no steeper than most of the New Hampshire hikes but altitude was a major challenge, even with medicines designed to lessen the impact.

The hike took Lloyd and her sister from rainforest to alpine desert, desert, snowfields and glaciers and ended with a predawn assault and sunrise on the rim.

Lloyd remembers thinking she’d get through the more difficult stretches of the climb by thinking of friends and praying, but found she could only endure the struggle for breath by counting, first from 1 to 100, then finally from 1 to 10, for hours at a time.

“The hardest part was the altitude sickness. You just couldn’t catch a breath,” Lloyd said.

Lloyd took a photograph as she rounded the last bend to the summit and captured 50 to 75 climbers milling about the summit’s famous marker. She spent just 15 minutes at the top before heading down, but took away a clearer sense of the enormity of the world and man’s place in the vastness of time.

Lloyd’s strength was tested in different ways after descending the mountains and separating from her sister for a trip to the Maseno Mission near Lake Victoria in Kenya.

The mission has an established medical clinic, school and orphanage as well as a program for children living on the streets.

Lloyd assisted in the hospital as a chaplain and assisted in the weekly feeding program for local orphans. Children would come to the mission for classes on Saturdays. The cups of tea with cream and sugar and the bowls of beans and corn they’d eat with their hands were sometimes the only meals the children could rely on every week.

Lloyd gave the sermon with the help of a translator during one service, which lasted three hours, primarily because of protracted appeals to the desperately poor parish for funds to keep the mission afloat.

Lloyd remains troubled by the poverty, wondering how many her church in Plymouth could feed with the money it spends simply to maintain its buildings each year.

But the church also provides shelter for Plymouth’s homeless and food through its pantry to people who are hungry. The Africans, meanwhile, raise concerns of their own, offering services to the children of a man’s first wife, but ignoring the plight of the additional families that pervade some societies.

Lloyd ended her trip in more traditional tourist style, on safari in the Serengeti and the Ngoro Ngoro Crater.

She saw lions, giraffes, hippos, cheetahs, hyenas, warthogs and even a charging elephant, but was struck as much by the beauty of the hilly landscape.

Lloyd returned from Africa in September, but did not return to the pulpit until December. She recently started to include experiences from her trip into her sermons, but knows there are lessons she is still only coming to realize.

She finds herself frustrated with the politics of churches and nations in the face of such overwhelming need. Recent political unrest in Kenya, for instance, has made it unsafe for the Maseno Mission even to hold its weekly food program. But Lloyd realizes as well that governments and institutions like the church are facts of life and change must come from within that framework.

The trip up Mount Kilimanjaro left Lloyd prepared to fight most challenges that come her way, but one challenge, the urge to simplify, still seems elusive.

“How do you live in this busy, busy world and enjoy the kind of silence, that deep, deep stillness, experienced in the Serengeti?” Lloyd asked. “As busy as we are, we long for it, but we can’t stop.”