02.18.08
Finding a noble cause for old shoes
I run at times with a friend at UNC. He has recently returned from Uganda, and was telling me about a very noble cause he has championed recently. I asked him to write about it, and about his request for our old used shoes. Here is what he wrote:
My name is Scott Ickes; I’m a grad student at UNC and a former collegiate middle distance runner from William and Mary (’04). I have recently returned from a yearlong experience in Uganda where I taught and started a track and cross country team at Christ School Bundibugyo. Bundibugyo is a small mark on the globe along the Congolese border. It is one of the poorest and most remote district’s in Uganda, effectively cut off from the rest of the country by the towering Rwenzori Mountains. Christ School is a co-ed secondary boarding school that was started in 1999 by World Harvest Mission in an effort to bring lasting change and empowerment to the young people of this district through holistic education. To this end, our school’s track team became am important opportunity for about 40 of our school’s 350 boys and girls to participate in a sport. During our first year in operation we traveled to the national track and field championships and constructed a track at the school.
In order to remain active, Christ School needs a regular supply of used shoes. I am organizing regular shipments of used shoes, preferably women’s sizes 8 through 11.5 and men’s sizes 8-10.5. Spikes and road flats are also welcome. I usually work out at the UNC track on Wednesdays at from 6:15 to 7:45. I’d love your old shoes. Small cash donations (It costs about $4 per pair to send them) will be helpful, but not necessary.
Thanks,
Scott
sbicke@gmail.com
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Tori said,
February 20, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Hallelujah! I have searched and searched for something like this and only occassionally have come across a local running store doing Soles for Souls….so this is awesome!! I have ooodles of women’s 8!! THANK YOU ROB for posting this!!!
my only question is - do the shoes have to have insoles? I have a few pairs that are insole deficient because I just recently gave the pairs I could find insoles for to Omega sports who BTW is having a shoe collection for the month of February.
But, i would much rather give them to Scott and will from now on. What a blesssing! These have been piling up in my house for over a year now - which means i have roughly more than about 14 pairs laying around - but I refuse to throw them away….they are still so good comparably.
joan said,
February 21, 2008 at 9:59 am
With permission, I am posting Scott’s essay about Christ School:
“We are Somehow Trying”
Scott B. Ickes
“Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.” Hebrews 12:12-13
It poured rain today in the middle of cross country practice, and as we sought shelter under the tin roof chapel, I watched our makeshift track turn to mud. The worn-out dirt path that we run along became a murky brown canal encircling the soccer pitch, our school’s only athletic field. Our track bears the marks of Bundibugyo’s austere climate. The proverbial wet season soaks turn the soil to soup. The mess is remedied with a patchwork of broken bricks and stones that crack, buckle, and turn to dust in the incessant dry heat. The ground and life in Bundibugyo are one and the same: uneven, harsh, and unpredictable.
Along the Congolese border, Bundibugyo is a small mark on the globe in Western Uganda. It is possibly the poorest, most isolated Ugandan district, whose name means “the place from which there is no other.” Christ School Bundibugyo is a secondary school, founded in 1999, in an effort to bring lasting advancement and holistic change. The next generation of leadership in this rural African place will be young women and men who have the academic excellence to forge ahead, and the disciplined character to do so with integrity and a heart for service. A slow but sure vision of hope, of generational change.
In most American schools, a cross country coach is lucky to find seven decent runners to field a team. The participants tend to be boys and girls who have little interest in other sports, or who didn’t make the cut on another team. Rarely do you find young people whose first choice is to run. In February, at our first assembly of the new school year, I stood up to announce Christ School’s newest team. “Who among you can run?” I asked in a tone intended to challenge and inspire. I looked out at a silent, staring crowd of almost three hundred shaved black heads, wondering if I should rephrase my question, until a faceless voice called out, “Sir, all of us.” Six weeks later we are over thirty-five strong.
Our team is a tribe of little boys and grown young men. And where they are still very much adolescents, their lives of hardship, loss and uncertainty have given them a kind of precocious wisdom. In the top group of seven runners, four are without fathers. The father of one pair of brothers is in prison for murdering their mother in front of them. An overwhelming majority of these boys were not raised with their fathers around, even if he was living during their childhood. Very few, if any, have intact families with both parents alive and present in their lives.
The members of the team, like most people in Bundibugyo, are short. Their growth has been stunted by chronic, low-grade malnutrition—a kind of silent dull inadequacy that is just enough to hurt, and that rarely goes away. The older boys are distinguishable only by their matured faces, some of them into their twenties, still trying to complete secondary school amidst the countless distractions of poverty. It’s a challenge to know how to coach a group like this, knowing so little of the actual struggle it is merely to survive in this place. Yet I am learning that sport has a quality that transcends cultures; for one and a half hours a day we are more the same than at any other time.
For the first time in my life, I am helping to build something from the ground up. With two-dozen used running shoes, socks, plastic cones, and a water jug, we have constructed a team, at least in appearance. But to a lifelong runner, it’s still a shadow. This place is a far cry from the New England prep school I was teaching at seven months ago. It is a daily battle for me to convince myself that it is real and that it counts. Cross country is a sport where success is predicated on consistency, which seems impossible in this place of life on the margin. Our team has never had perfect attendance. Every day at 4:30 when we begin practice, a different student comes to tell me that he won’t be able to run because he is injured or sick. And despite my initial reaction of belittling the problems, I have visited them in the hospital and have seen the positive malaria tests; their swollen knees and lost toe-nails are real and they hurt. If a student gets injured I have virtually no options, other than to tell him to rest and stretch. There is no ice here, and visiting a nurse means a getting permission to leave school to go to the hospital.
As these students persevere day after day, they move deeper into my heart. I cannot solve the global injustice, the isolating effects of poverty, the insidious drain of poor nutrition that form nearly insurmountable boundaries to these boys reaching their full potential. But like the writer to the Hebrews, I can equip a few with a sense of purpose, discipline, and accomplishment that will enable them to scale those hurdles themselves. I can be the adult who believes in them, the coach who cheers them on, the teacher who strives to run a holy road and invites them to follow.
In Bundibugyo there is an expression that typifies life here and embodies our goal as a team. When someone complements you for working at something the common response is “We are somehow trying.” With each stride we are trying, through the basic ritual of running, to lift up drooping hands, strengthen weak knees, and set young people running on straight paths.
March 2007
Victor said,
February 21, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Amazing story