Like many Dublin kids, Sara Sarafa was inspired to begin Irish dancing after going to the Dublin Irish Festival when she was 7. She developed a passion for performing, dedicating six days a week to training all the way up until her final performance at the end of her senior year of high school at Dublin Jerome.
Sarafa credits Irish dancing for her everyday perseverance and determination.
“I feel like that’s where my value of work ethic came from,” she says. “The instructors teach you respect and how to work hard on things. I owe a lot to them.”
Sarafa had no idea that one day she’d trade her dancing shoes in for hiking boots and scale the tallest free-standing mountain in the world, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. She laughs when reflecting that she used to spend hours getting her hair and makeup ready for dance performances, but years later, during her climb up the mountain, she didn’t shower for a week. But hygiene aside, surprisingly, Sarafa finds many similarities between the two passions.
“I really enjoyed the aspect of dance being individualistic but also working as a team,” she says. “Climbing the mountain was sort of the same thing because you go with a team to get to the top. It’s the same camaraderie I had growing up.”
All those years being attentive to footwork helped with climbing, too.
“While I was climbing, I focused on making deliberate steps one after the other,” Sarafa says, “and while I’m not pointing my toes all the way up the summit, I’m constantly thinking about what my feet are doing every step of the way.”
Good Morning, Let’s Climb a Mountain
For most people, merely the conversation of taking on a record-breaking mountain might sound both terrifying and daunting. But for Sarafa, it was just another phone call from her brother David Sarafa in 2019.
“I had been in kind of a slump looking for something else to get up and do,” she says. “Since dancing ended, I really hadn’t found a new hobby.”
David called her one morning to announce he was going to Africa to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in three months and asked if she would like to go with him. Sarafa jumped on the opportunity.
Sarafa says to prepare for the climb, a lot of people will go to lower-level mountains to practice. But since she lived in Michigan at the time, she used the StairMaster at the gym and wore hiking boots and a weighted backpack.
She and David weren’t alone, though, as both their spouses came along for the feat. Sarafa and her husband Daniel and David and his wife Kelly all attended Dublin Jerome and were high school sweethearts.
As romantic as that is, the climb wasn’t just a sweet couple’s getaway. There were difficult parts of the journey, summit night being one of them. The climbers are directed to go to bed around 7 p.m. to wake up at 11 p.m. and climb for 14 hours straight, 4,000 feet up.
“It’s pitch black, you’re climbing over boulders and it’s the arctic,” she says. “But of course, the most amazing part is getting up to the summit.”
Sarafa jokes that a lot of people assume when you get to the top you have this existential, worldly first words, but she believes hers were something along the lines of, “Holy crap, I made it.”
Bringing Others Along
Although beautiful, the area around Mount Kilimanjaro is impoverished. Sarafa works with the same group guides and has established relationships with the locals, some of whom rely heavily on tourism for income. This year with COVID-19, only a fraction of climbers visited the mountain.
“One of our regular guides told us that without our help, he wouldn’t be able to feed his family this year,” she says. “Also, a lot of people who climb with us will help out with local charities and visit schools in the surrounding area.”
Sarafa speaks warmly of the coffee plantations, the Serengeti and especially the people.
“They’re so warm and welcoming,” she says. “Getting to know the people is one of the best parts of the experience. At night, after a day of climbing the mountain, we’d play checkers and cards and stay up way too late.”
The experience of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro was so life-changing that Sarafa and David didn’t want the journey to end, so they developed their own tour company called Kopa Tours.
“We wanted other people to come experience this, too,” she says.
Although no one else from Dublin has been up the mountain yet, Sarafa is determined to get her loved ones there. She believes that everyone should learn how to push themselves and reap the benefits of putting in the hard work.
“You feel this elated sense when you reach the top,” she says. “You feel like you can do anything.”
It’s In Her Dublin DNA
No matter how far away Sarafa travels, she credits Dublin for the person she has become today.
“I had so many role models throughout my Dublin life who led me down this path,” she says. “Being in Africa and listening to our guide about the things that are difficult for them; his kids take a two-hour bus to get to school. We’re so thankful we grew up in Dublin. It taught us what support means.”
Sarafa remembers that even her high school teacher taught her what community means through helping her get her very first job at Five Guys. It was as simple as him believing she was a good student and wanting to help in any way he could.
“The support system makes you feel like a family and you don’t see that everywhere in the world,” she says, “and now we’re the ones that get to provide people the support to go on this journey.”
And speaking of journeys, Sarafa’s journey doesn’t stop here. Her next dream is to bring Kopa Tours to all of the Seven Summits, a collection of the highest mountains from each of the seven continents.
If Sarafa’s story can tell us anything, it’s that you can only go up from here.
She shows us that altitude – sorry, attitude – is everything.
Mallory Arnold is an editor. Feedback welcome at marnold@cityscenemediagroup.com.
