One might infer, in Diana Fedorenko’s recent successful ascent of the highest mountain in Africa, a metaphor for personal experience. For the nineteen year old Edinburgh University student’s trajectory, from the war-torn Eastern margin of Ukraine, to England and the Yorkshire Dales, to an outstanding career at Giggleswick school, is little short of astonishing, considering the unpromising nature of her earlier circumstances.

But Diana is not given to metaphor. Entirely devoid of artifice and blessed with an honesty that finds sanctuary in humility, she is keen, rather, to return the warmth shown to her by her hosts since her arrival:

‘I’ve been fortunate to receive a lot of kindness, support, and a warm welcome since arriving in Yorkshire. That experience has remained with me and encouraged me to want to help others in the same way that people helped me. I’ve always enjoyed a personal challenge and pushing myself beyond my comfort zone, so when the opportunity to climb Kilimanjaro arose, it felt like the perfect means of reconciling the demands of a personal challenge with the need to make a difference in the lives of others.'

Since her desire to ‘conquer’ the Tanzanian peak is predicated, at least partly, on a compulsion to ‘give back’, it is fitting that the beneficiaries of Diana’s efforts will be Dig Deep, an international development charity whose mandate is to secure clean water, safe sanitation and good hygiene for the one million people of Bomet County, Kenya; and especially for children under five, who are most susceptible to waterborne diseases.

Born in Bilopillia, and educated at boarding school in Sumy on the Russo-Ukraine border, Diana was evacuated, with her mother, Oksana and young brother, Herman, during the early incursions of the Russian army into the Sumy Oblast. The departure was effected in haste, leaving Diana’s father behind to fight, and ripping the extended family apart. Arriving in Yorkshire with a smattering of English but the composure and determination to thrive, Diana now speaks the language comme un natif, and with the nuanced vigour of a thoroughgoing provincial. It is somehow a measure of the girl that she has endured: a volcano, standing at 19,341 ft above sea-level, is only the most recent of her achievements.

вперед і вгору, as they may, or may not say, in Ukraine.


Diana’s Kilimanjaro climb was undertaken in support of Dig Deep.

https://www.digdeep.org.uk/whoweare