Everlasting men

This ongoing series portrays the everyday lives of the Mount Kilimanjaro porters, their personal stories and their duties on the mountain. The whole series is being done in analog. 1. Moshi: A city on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, which also functions as a base camp for the climbers. It owes its name to Old Moshi, an old town surrounded by rain forest. 2. In Swahili, Moshi literally means “fog”. Hierarchies among porters, cooks and guides creates a certain distrust and feelings of unease, and at the same time language is a barrier among the group. We share time and laughs, but the hierarchies and language barrier feel like a curtain, creating a division between us and them, resembling the dense fog suddenly appearing in the base camps. I wrote in my journal details like names and ages. Also simple words, idioms or numbers in Swahili, and the translation to our language. Human curiosity creates familiarity among us, but we still feel a certain distance between porters and travellers. The fog and the porter’s duties seem to contribute, alienating these people. The Everlasting flower belongs to a special kind of plant, giving it the ability to blossom at heights of 4000m, or even higher. The flower closes up at night for protection from the cold and opens its petals to the sunlight during the day. Nature’s tenacity is a symbol of hard-work and making sacrifices in order to reach the peak. It’s the eternal circle of life, death, and beauty.