Huntington Collecting Soles for Souls
A shoe drive to benefit the international charity Soles 4 Souls kicked off in the Huntington School on June 10. The drive will run through Friday, June 24. Organizers hope to collect hundreds of pairs of shoes.
Collection boxes have been placed in the lobby of Flower Hill, Southdown, Washington, Jefferson and Woodhull elementary schools as well as J. Taylor Finley Middle School.
"We are accepting gently used shoes," said Linda Costello-Roth, a district administrator who helped organize the drive. "We will be collecting shoes in good condition to send down to the tornado and flood ravaged south."
"Shoes help prevent the spread of parasitic diseases that plague over 1.4 billion people worldwide and they are a basic human necessity," according to the Soles 4 Souls website. "The reality of life for many individuals in developing nations is that having a pair of shoes is a rarity. It is not uncommon for children to grow up in these areas without ever having had a pair of shoes at all. The number of barefoot orphaned children, in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, is estimated to be above 20 million. Over 300 million children worldwide are without shoes."
Soles 4 Souls said it has distributed more than 14,500,000 shoes to date and distributes another pair every seven seconds. Check out www.soles4souls.org for more information about the organization.
"Shoes are very often considered a required part of the school uniform in developing countries, and without shoes, many children are unable to attend school," states Soles 4 Souls website. "Many serious health conditions can be absorbed through the feet, even through the toughest soles. As the skin on the bottom of the feet toughens and thickens, large cracks can form, which allows parasitic infections such as hookworm and threadworm to penetrate the skin. In addition, constant cuts and scrapes to the feet and ankles frequently become infected and many of these infections can lead to ulcers and worse."