Barefoot in Kibera

April 5th 2011 was One Day Without Shoes led by TOMs, a for-profit company who will send a pair of shoes to a kid who has none everytime someone purchases a pair of TOMs shoes. Myself, Godwill and Moses decided to join in and walked barefoot all day. We met at 8am to walk through the slum to the Mashimoni compound together and received so many bewildered stares and quizzical looks you would think we had turned purple. I didn't notice much though as my eyes were fixed on the ground spying out glass, stones, bottle tops and any other potentially harmful object ahead of me.

The idea of the day is to raise awareness and probably to sell more TOMs shoes but we had our own reasons for walking barefoot for the day. Godwill had just returned from his latest mission trip to the Kenyan coast with Nairobi Baptist Church. While he was there he witnessed the pain caused by 'jiggers' and was moved to do something about it. I should say, a jigger is a parasitic anthropod which burrows into people's toes and causes pain and iritation as it feeds and grows. lovely.

Godwill noted a particular incident when he was running a football workshop, a young boy of around 7 was trying to join in the game but had to run on his heels because his toes were so infested with jiggers. The boy reminded Godwill so much of his nephew of the same age. It was as he considered what he would do if his nephew had such a problem that he resolved to do what he could to get shoes for those kids.

The plan is to get people within Kenya to donate shoes their kids have grown out of or even buy a few pairs to send out to Kwale on the next mission trip. I love that Godwill is looking to his church and to people within the country to deal with this issue and thats why we wanted to raise awareness here in Nairobi. People across rural Kenya wear no shoes all the time and thats not usually a big deal but in areas where jiggers are prevalent there is a problem and the sight of 3 otherwise well dressed young people walking around Nairobi with no shoes on certainly seemed to cause a stir. Project Director Kariuki was enjoying telling gawkers that he was punishing us! I hope it will help give some momentum to Godwill's mission.