Team Goes to Great Heights to Help Charities

It was an almost throwaway line in an e-mail written last summer by Tara Blasco that caught the attention of her friend in Britain.

The Ojai counselor was writing to thank Erica Longton for sending her a small gift. Blasco mentioned that she and her boyfriend, Lyn Hebenstreit, were planning to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro after Jan. 1 and asked if Longton wanted to join them.

“I would, actually” was the reply from the 40-year-old acupuncturist who lives near London. She had already trekked twice through the Himalayas.

When their journey ended last month, nearly $85,000 was raised for two nonprofit organizations based in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

Hebenstreit, an accountant by training, had arranged the climb to benefit the Ojai-based charity he started three years ago, Global Resource Alliance, which supports community development projects in the Mara region of Tanzania and children orphaned by AIDS.

At Longton’s suggestion, a second fundraiser was linked with the trip to support a nonprofit research center in Santa Barbara: the Building and Enhancing Bonding and Attachment -- or BEBA -- clinic, which is devoted to infant-centered family therapy. Blasco, 43, operates a BEBA satellite clinic in Ojai, which opened last fall.

The women met in 1989, when they began the first of eight training sessions to learn about prenatal and birth therapy from BEBA’s co-founder, Raymond Castellino. His method is a mixture of midwifery, obstetrics and prenatal psychology.

The underlying principle of BEBA is that babies have memory from the moment of conception, experience the same emotional highs and lows as their mothers during pregnancy and are eager to communicate once they are born. Castellino’s goal is to teach parents how to understand their newborn’s nonverbal “language” and form a healthy bond with their child.

Dr. James McGregor, a visiting professor of obstetrics and gynecology in the division of maternal medicine at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, said the concept of improving a child’s chance in life by welcoming it into the world before birth dated to 15th century China.

“Many cultures like [those in] Russia, China, Japan and Korea have a tacit understanding of this.... Russian people have a long history of reading to their unborn child and playing music, especially classical music,” McGregor said. “We’re biological beings, and optimizing bonding increases the baby’s health.”

The 12-year-old BEBA clinic, which depends on donations for about two-thirds of its $90,000 annual operating budget, almost closed last summer.

The African expedition was used to anchor BEBA’s first large-scale fundraising drive, collecting more than $31,000. “The Kilimanjaro trip is really going to help us through this year,” said Castellino, 60.

Blasco had little experience hiking and initially balked at the idea of tackling Africa’s highest mountain. When Hebenstreit “told me about it the first time, I said, ‘No way.’ ”

Blasco, a director for the Global Resource Alliance, and Hebenstreit spent six months conditioning for their trip by hiking in California mountain ranges. They even went to Sequoia National Park to scale Alta Peak, which at more than 11,200 feet above sea level is still dwarfed by Kilimanjaro’s 19,340 feet.

Hebenstreit, 53, has hiked about a decade but had never gone above 14,000 feet. He knew the six-day African ascent would be arduous for him and the other climbers: Blasco, Longton, Tania McCracken -- another Global Resource volunteer -- and officials of three Tanzanian self-help organizations the Ojai charity supports.

The first day began in a rain forest at the base of Kilimanjaro and involved only a four-hour hike to the initial campsite, Mandara Hut. On the fourth day, the high daytime temperature was 30 degrees during an eight-hour trek to the pre-summit campsite.

The team got a few hours to nap, then started again shortly after midnight for the final, grueling ascent of Gilman’s Point, along the eastern edge of the dormant volcano’s rim.

From that vantage point at 18,647 feet they would watch the sunrise.

“It’s a very exhausting kind of terrain,” Hebenstreit said of what they encountered the last day. “It’s not fun at all, but it is awesome.”

With the wind chill, it was also frigid. Blasco said she had to stamp her feet every few yards to keep them warm. But once the sun appeared, the ordeal seemed worth it.

“I thought, ‘This is great. We did it,’ ” she said. “The view of the glaciers was astonishing. The view of the sunrise was amazing. But all I could think of was ‘Let’s take the pictures and go back down.’ ”

Hebenstreit and Blasco raised about $53,000 for the Global Resource Alliance. They stayed in Africa an additional two weeks to provide hands-on assistance to several of the charities the organization sponsors. Before their return, the couple took 17 orphans on a three-day safari to the Serengeti.

Longton, who helped chaperon that outing, initially thought she would never consider scaling Kilimanjaro again. Now, she’s not so sure.

“We started joking the next day that it’s probably a lot like childbirth -- after a few days all you can remember are the good things,” she said. “I may consider doing it again, but not for a very long time.”