matching shoes...

... for several hours in the parking lot last Saturday, when the city wide recycling event came to an end. The organization I volunteered myself for was wrapping up their efforts to recycle shoes, and had one big final day for citizens to bring unwanted 'gently worn' shoes to recycle. Any shoes: army boots to slippers, three-inch glitter covered pumps to flip-flops, everything was accepted. I really do hope I will eventually see a photo of those excessively high-heels on some sweet young thing as she sashays through the rain forest.

The plan was to gather up all the unwanted shoes that might go to the thrift store when people get in the right frame of mind to clean out the clutter on the closet floor. You know, of course, you have to be ruthless in order to part with things you have not worn in three or thirteen years, but think you might, maybe, possibly have an opportunity some time in the distant future, right? And then there is the 'fit' factor - those things that looked so good on you forty pounds ago, that you think you might wear when you get serious about loosing the weight in January?

I decided I could do the early shift in the parking lot at the library on Macon Rd., but was soon sent to the other location in a shopping center, where there was a need for more hands to do the pairing. The publicity alerted the community, reporting all shoes could be dropped off at any fire station in town. So there were boxes and boxes and boxes of shoes: un-matched, with mates somewhere down there in the depths of the stinky-moldy-mildewy box, awaiting discovery. Many could be tied together with shoe strings, but others had to be matched, put together with rubber bands to keep them mated. Do you think as they were firmly attached, securely bound together, that they might reproduce in the dark while no one was looking? I started off with gloves on to keep all the 'whatever' off my hands, but took them off at some point. Then felt only marginally clean after washing them four times when I finished my shift!

The goal is to keep them out of the landfill. The bonus is that there is someone somewhere who will pay for the used shoes. They are packed into a cargo container and shipped to a developing country to be used by people who do not have anything on their feets. I do not know if they are 'given' or sold, but suspect they will be sold, since the non-profit gets paid for the shoes by weight, and it definitely will cost something to ship a freight container to central America or Africa.