Peace Corps volunteers complete 292 kilometer run

Sally Kintner, a Flathead Valley resident who worked at Glacier Park for several years and played in the Glacier Symphony, recently took on a 175-mile run across northern Ethiopia to promote HIV awareness and education.

She and six other Peace Corps volunteers completed the eight-day, 282-kilometer Tigray Trek between Oct. 30 and Nov. 7 — equivalent to about a marathon a day. Kintner said the run went great, although she suffered from amoebiasis for part of the run.

The group raised $4,586 for a local NGO called imagine1day and provided HIV education sessions for 528 youths including 324 boys and 204 girls in the nine villages along the way.

“Highlights included invitations to people’s homes for t’ihele, a traditional food consisting of a sort of spicy fondue and barley balls, running alongside teenage girls on their way to school in Negash, meeting children who had benefited directly from imagine1day’s work, and witnessing a 75 percent solar eclipse while delivering an HIV session in Adigudem on Nov. 3,” she said.

The total distance covered by the runners in eight days was 282 kilometers. Altogether, the core group of seven Peace Corps volunteers ran 1,170 kilometers. One member alone ran 252 kilometers. The longest distance covered in one day was 48 kilometers, from Mekele to Adi Kayih.

The runners purchased 268 liters of water, nine kilos of bananas and five kilos of oranges. One runner drank 6.5 liters in a day on the road. Six runners reported bum knees at the end of the trek, and two suffered from heat exhaustion. They also encountered one dead hyena in a ditch.

Sub-Saharan Africa has been very hard hit by the global AIDS pandemic, and Ethiopia has one of the highest numbers of people living with HIV in the world. For more information, visit online at www.crowdrise.com/hawzeintoalamata/fundraiser and http://peacecorps.gov and www.imagine1day.org or e-mail sally.r.kintner@gmail.com.