A number of years ago, I climbed into a van with some friends and headed to the great city of New Orleans. It was summer, hot and humid, even for those of us used to it from coastal North Carolina. We were armed with craft supplies, loads energy, and great ideas – we were going to lead day camps for kids. You see, we figured we had a lot to teach them.
My classroom was a tiny room inside a church in urban New Orleans. There was no air conditioning and hardly any room to move. The kids were so excited to be there – particularly for the snacks. We found out later that many of them did not eat during the day because they were on their own in the summer, some as young as five years old. When school was out, there was nothing to do, and their parents still had to work. So they wandered the streets of New Orleans. And this summer, they wandered to us.
There were two dirty-faced boys in my classroom. Both were clearly too old for the third grade but they wanted to stay. My problem kids. They were so wild and loud and had very little respect for authority. With me standing just a bit over five feet tall, this was quite the problem.
On about the third day, one of them didn’t show up. And his brother was in a mood. So, I took him out into the hall. I started to read him the riot act and he did a surprising thing: he cried. Instinctively, I started to rub his back to calm him down. He flinched. I pulled his shirt up and saw these horrible red marks across his back. He saw me staring, pulled his shirt back down, rubbed his eyes dry, and told me that he had fallen while trying to climb a gate. Only we both knew the truth.
That day, I really saw him. He was so skinny. And the thing I remember most clearly is that his shoes didn’t remotely fit his feet.
I went back to my room that night and cried. I had seen poor people before, I went to school with them and on paper, I was probably one of them. My whole life, I had heard how we did not have money to buy things. I had watched my dad work hours and hours of shift work in order to put food on the table. We were never poor like that. I went to school every morning clean and dressed properly – with breakfast in my belly and a good lunch in my lunch box. My mom was waiting for me when I got home from school and on days off, there was always someone there to take care of me.
It was, I decided, not fair. And I resolved to do what I could – well, as much as a 14-year-old girl could. I convinced my friends to pony up their souvenir money and we bought him a new pair of shoes. We figured out what size he wore by asking all of the kids in the class to take off their shoes and trace their feet to cut out for a craft – only we took his footprint, along with an assortment of bunched up dollar bills to a local shoe store.
And for the rest of my stay in New Orleans, I gave him some extra attention every day. We practiced reading – he was in the third grade and couldn’t read a proper sentence. I made sure that he had enough to eat. But mostly, I just hung out with him.
I was so scared to go back to North Carolina. I worried about him. When I was gone, who would take care of him? I gave him a stack of pre-addressed, pre-stamped envelopes as a goodbye present. For the first couple of months, he would send me drawings and an occasional note about how he was doing. And then the letters stopped. I felt defeated.
But then something remarkable happened. In spring, I got a tattered envelope in the mail, addressed just to “Kelly” with my address. Inside were plastic Mardi Gras beads and a note. The note said:
Dear Kelly,
I passed third grade this year. Thank you. You are the only person who was nice to me.
Adam
P.S. Here are some Mardi Gars beads.
Twenty-something years later, that memory is still fresh for me. I was just a little girl – and I did something big. And it didn’t take a lot of money or any extraordinary talent. It just took taking a moment to really see what was going on around me.
I was reminded of this story – which some of you may remember from before – because today is One Day Without Shoes.
One Day Without Shoes is sponsored by TOMS Shoes with some great other participating partners like AOL, Discovery Channel, American Greetings, EA, Essie, Flickr, Kiehls, and Kind Healthy Snacks. But it’s not a charity. It’s a movement to raise awareness of what it means for kids to not have a pair of shoes to wear.
New shoes help provide an extra layer of health care by helping protect children’s feet from cuts, infection, and soilborne diseases. New shoes can also encourage families to send their children to school and, as you know from my story, they can instill a little hope and self-confidence in a child that may be in desperate need of a boost.
TOMS is a for-profit business (with a social mission) so they aren’t able to accept donations. They do – as do I – encourage you to send a donation to an organization working to improve children’s health and education.
And since this is a tax blog, I’m going to remind you of a few things:
- Check to make sure the organization is a qualified charity if you hope to claim a charitable deduction for your gift.
- Get a receipt.
- Keep good records.
You can find more tips for charitable giving here.
So won’t you kick your shoes off with me today? Take the challenge. Tell your friends. Make a statement. Stand for something.