That's great ... Gary Barlow with Ugandan kids
In March, the Take That star led a team of nine celeb climbers, including Cheryl Cole and Ronan Keating, up the 15,000ft Tanzanian peak, raising £3.5million for Comic Relief.
This month Gary flew to Uganda to help distrubute 500,000 life-saving mosquito nets the money helped to buy.
Here, Gary tells how his visit made the agonising trek worthwhile.
DURING the climb of Mount Kilimanjaro lots of questions ran through my mind.
Would I be able to handle the terrain, the altitude, the cold? Would any of us reach the top?
No matter how tough it was, though, you knew one thing was certain - that the cash being raised would be used by Comic Relief to do an awful lot of good.
For more than 20 years, the charity has been helping to change lives for the better and, just like the rest of the British public - including, no doubt, millions of Sun readers - I've always known a pound given to Comic Relief is a pound very well spent.
But when they asked me if I wanted to see for myself the kind of impact the cash makes on the ground, to meet face-to-face the people who would benefit, I thought it was a fantastic idea.
It's important to everyone who did the climb that all those people who were good enough to support us get to see the kind of thing they have helped to make happen.
So I said yes, and together with four of the Kili team - Fearne Cotton, Chris Moyles, Ben Shephard and Kimberley Walsh - I headed to Uganda to see the distribution of a shipment of malaria nets that Comic Relief money had paid for.
Malaria is a devastating disease. In Africa it takes the life of a child every 30 seconds. Often bitten as they sleep, the uncovered youngsters are defenceless against the mosquitoes that carry it.
I can't begin to imagine what it must feel like to put your children down for the night knowing, by morning, they could have caught the disease that will kill them.
All it takes to protect them is a simple bed net - and one costs just five pounds. Five pounds to keep a family safe.
Once we arrived in the part of western Uganda where the nets would be given out, I visited the local hospital to see first-hand the damage that malaria causes.
As I walked into the crowded ward the doctor told me that more than half the deaths in the entire hospital were down to malaria.
Scores of children lay motionless everywhere - in the ramshackle cots, on top of drawers and on every inch of floor space.
And there was silence. In a room packed full of small children not one of them was crying. They were too ill for that, they were just quietly dying - all for the want of a net.
But for thousands of people that was about to change. The next morning we arrived at a meeting point on the outskirts of a town called Hoima and were met with lorries packed with nets - 14,000 of them to be precise.
And every single one was paid for with Red Nose Day cash.
We had helped to load the nets from the warehouse to the lorries the previous day. Those nets are much heavier than they look all packaged up.
I still have problems with my back that started on the climb and loading them reminded me how much pain I was in on that mountain. All of that was worth it, though, to see the physical evidence of what all of the donations had paid for.
Over the course of a day we helped to give out all of the nets to thousands of people - the vast majority of them parents who had walked for miles in blistering heat.
The five of us had such a great time handing out the nets. I think Ben Shephard and Chris Moyles even competed at one stage to see who could hand them out the fastest! You can see our efforts first-hand in the documentary Comic Relief: The Net Result on BBC1 on Sunday, December 27 at 6.30pm, which follows our trip to Uganda.
The atmosphere was amazing, almost like a carnival. Families whose lives, up until now, had been at risk every time they went to bed, couldn't believe it. They were finally getting the simple thing they needed to protect themselves. Watching people go off with their nets knowing their lives were about to change was brilliant.
While giving out the nets I met an amazing woman called Flora. She's 38 and has ten children. When we met, three of her children were really ill with malaria because they didn't have any mosquito nets. Being able to give her enough nets for her and her family was incredible.
And the great thing is, that was just the start of it - days like that will be repeated countless times over the coming months with 1.5MILLION people being given protection across an area the size of Northern Ireland - thanks to money raised for Comic Relief.
That's what you call making a real impact - and being there to see it happen made every single tortuous step up Kilimanjaro more than worth it.
So anyone who texted a fiver or donated any money can sit at home and feel proud that you've made people's lives very different
Video Blog: The Uganda Trip
http://www.officialfearnecotton.com/2009/12/the-uganda-trip/
Video of Fearne etc in Uganda with Gary and his mother briefly featured.
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