Edmonton longboarders pushing hard to raise money for Burundi

There's a reason skateboarders carve down a hill and carry their boards back up.

But if you're a purist and longboarding all the way from Edmonton to Portland, Ore. to raise money for a good cause, you've got to push your way uphill too.

Caleb Sinn, 20, and Jordan Smith, 19, now nearing the halfway point to the Pacific coast, say the hardest leg of the journey so far was actually the flat Alberta terrain.

"The fun thing with B.C. is every time we're going up, there's obviously going to be a down," Smith told Edmonton AM's Mark Connolly Monday. "Where Alberta going east to west, it always just seems it goes up and flat, up and flat."

So why push yourself up and over the Rockies?

Sinn said after working in Burundi with the Edmonton-based NGO Loveworks a few years ago, the experience had affected him so much, he wanted to do more for the country and eventually turned to his passion for longboarding.

Sinn came up with the idea of crossing the province on a board to raise money and awareness for Burundi and began looking for support.

That's when he met Smith.

"He walked into a local skateshop that I was working at looking for a sponsorship," Smith recalled. "He kinda looked at me and said, 'Hey you want to come along?'

"That night he sent me an essay on what he saw in Burundi and the injustice and after reading it, I couldn't say no."

This is the third fundraising trek for the friends. Two years ago they longboarded from Lloydminster to Edmonton and last year from Lake Louise to Vancouver.

They have raised thousands of dollars through their pushforburundi.com website, the money going towards providing one of the poorest villages in the small, impoverished African country of Burundi with clean water, housing, food and education.

Even with all their time on the road, they're finding you can always learn something new.

With the effort on a shoestring budget, the pair tried satisfying their massive appetites with hotdogs - five days in a row.

"We've moved on to sandwich meat," Sinn said. "We're living the dream now."