Shoes for Jamaica

We decided to go back in October of 2013.  We planned for 8 days. We thought that was as long as we could reasonably be away from our kids and still have time to see everything we wanted to and to go everywhere that we wanted to go.  We prayed for God to make the right connections for us and to show us a clearer vision of what our future was to hold.

Even though we wanted to make friends, visit properties, and do some sightseeing, we also wanted to have another purpose for our trip. How could we help?  What could we do?  We wanted this time to also be spent for a “mission” trip, not just a “vision” trip.

So, I asked our friend, Linda.  We know that there are all kinds of needs in Jamaica but what is one big need that we can help with?  Her response was: shoes.  People climb up and down the mountain villages, across the rocky terrain, with no shoes on their feet.

Wow.  And ouch.  Shoes, huh?  Okay, I think we can do that!  So, we started asking for shoes.  We asked our friends and our family to clean out their closets.  We posted about collecting shoes on Facebook.  We asked at our church and put out a bin in the hallway.  We passed out flyers. Everywhere we went, we mentioned shoes.  And people responded.

My phone was ringing with friends who had shoes to donate.  I had messages in my inbox from people who wanted to bring us shoes.  I got text messages from people I hardly even knew telling me that they had a bag or a box filled with shoes for us.  Our neighbors brought their shoes over after their rummage sales were over.  We gathered shoes from hours away.  Friends caravanned shoes from miles away to us.  Shoe collecting started taking on a life of it’s own.

We had shoes upon shoes!  I sorted them, cleaned them, and packed them away in preparation for our trip.  But I realized something: one morning I told Bruce that we had dozens and dozens of pairs of shoes, but most of them were adult sizes.  We were getting ready to leave soon and we had hardly collected any shoes for kids.  And weren’t children supposed to be our focus?

The next afternoon I got a phone call from Bruce.  He is an architect.  He was out that morning looking at an old Kmart store turned church that he was to convert to a warehouse for one of his clients. “You might want to sit down,” he said when I answered the phone.  Really? What’s up?  “I’ve got some kids shoes for you.”  Oh, okay, great!

There was a wall separating the church from a thrift store on one end of the building.  The church had moved out and when the building sold, the thrift store was forced to close down. The woman who ran the store had come next door to see who was rambling around in the other part of the building. That's when she told Bruce that they were going out of business.  He said, "You don’t, by chance, have any kids shoes over there, do you?”

Boy, did she ever!  She had so many shoes that I had to call in reinforcements!  My dad, Bruce and I took two cars and a van back across town to the thrift store to pick up all the shoes that she had. More than 25 bins full of children’s tennis shoes!  Many of them name brands like Nike, Addidas, Asics, Reebok and more.  And most of them brand new.

God answered my unspoken prayer.  And in a big way, too.  When we counted, we found that we had collected more than 750 pairs of shoes in just a few short weeks.  Wow.

When the next Monday night rolled around and our friends came over, we told them that we would not be having a bible study discussion that night.  We were leaving the next morning to fly to Jamaica (it’s cheaper to fly on a Tuesday, you know).  We needed to pack and we needed their help.  We spread the shoes out in the dining room, across the living room and into the family room.  We had to start making decisions about which pairs to take this trip and how to get them all in our suitcases.


Several hundred pairs of shoes went along with us on that trip.  And people continue to donate shoes to us all the time, dropping them off at local churches, calling us to pick them up or sometimes just ringing our doorbell. We take shoes with us each time that we go to Jamaica to give them away. The people there are very thankful and so are we.