Life in Motion: Kilimanjaro
Client: Life in Motion
About this Project
Sasha D’Jamoos was born without lower legs and when Natasha Shaginian-Needham first met the then 15-year-old, his only means of getting around his orphanage was to push himself on a skateboard. Natasha was filming a documentary when she asked Sasha about his hopes and dreams. His answer was simple, but would change the course of both of their lives forever. He said, “I want to walk.”
Natasha was moved. She founded the Life in Motion charity and shifted her work towards facilitating orthopedic treatment and prosthetic limbs for special needs children. She helped Sasha come to the United States to have surgery and receive prosthetic limbs. While in the United States, D’Jamoos was adopted into a French-American family, graduated high school and enrolled in the University of Texas-Austin.
His dream of walking had come true, but—not satisfied with simple locomotion—D’Jamoos decided he wanted to climb a mountain. Out of a personal desire to test his own limits D’Jamoos, Natasha and their fellow Life in Motion companion, Sasha Pohilko, decided to climb Tanzania’s Mt. Kilimanjaro. Over six days, on their legs and hands, the two men and their companions worked their way towards the summit of Africa’s tallest mountain.