Wear Shoes

don’t stare at man under bed – pick glass out of foot – beg for leather

Edenvale Hospital was a big, sprawling hospital east of Johannesburg, South Africa, all shiny and nice and well kept and busy, but it wasn’t Edenvale Hospital my mother took me to that day. It was Invisible Edenvale Hospital, hidden behind the big hospital, a sort of sub-hospital, out of sight, back there behind the pine trees, where it couldn’t be seen, a semi-secret hospital no more than rows of Quonset huts, half the size of the big buildings out front, but with twice the patients. So many patients in fact, people slept three to a bed, under beds, on gurneys, in the hallways or just sprawled on a floor. It was chaos, run by six Irish nuns, who worked as hard as anybody worked, sleeves rolled up, scurrying back and forth, begging for medical supplies, doctors, medicines anything they could get their hands on to help with the endless tide of broken bones, cuts, gashes, stab wounds, cancers, aches and pains that staggered, hobbled, crawled and fell through their doors every day.

My mother wanted to help. She wanted to do anything she could to aid this small cadre of over-worked nuns, and they had a specific request for her; shoes, any size, make, model, as many as she could get. You set someone like my mother on a task like that and step back. You want shoes? You’re going to get shoes.

To understand the need for shoes, you need to understand the township of Alexandria. What do I remember? Millions of people, Africans, Indians, families, gangs, hunger, dirt, corrugated iron roofs, cardboard walls, poverty, drugs, danger, exhilaration, chaos. And a lot of folk walking barefoot and getting glass in their feet, so many people that it was the number one injury treated at the hospital. Hence, the shoe drive.

I don’t remember the mechanics of this effort, posters, pleas, preaching from pulpits, none of that; I just remember driving round in my old beat up Morris station wagon, piling shoes into the trunk then driving over to the hospital, laying them out in rows and watching people pick over them looking for the right pair. Man, we must have gotten thousands of shoes over to that hospital. It went on for days. You want to save world, do big things, shake and rattle the days and nights, but sometimes all it takes is a pair of shoes, worn out, tossed aside, looking for a home.