“It sounds very basic, but a good pair of shoes has a great impact on a person’s life,” Hilda Fernández, executive director of Camillus House, the organization that will be in charge of distributing the footwear collected by the students, tells Efe.
Fernández spoke in this way in the patio of the Inguanzo family’s house in the city of Miami Lakes, which for the fourth consecutive year has become a warehouse for footwear collected through a campaign that in 2022 has been extended to city halls and schools in the counties. of Miami-Dade and Broward, in South Florida.
The campaign has existed since 2011, but never before has it been possible to collect such a quantity of shoes or so many new ones, some even with the original box and from well-known brands, Gina Inguanzo tells Efe, grateful for so much solidarity and proud of her children.
THE CLOTHES ARE WASHED, WHAT TO DO WITH THE FOOTWEAR?
Gina and her husband’s three children, Ramiro Inguanzo, twins Sophia and Susanna, and a son, Christopher, have worked for five weeks with classmates from Archbishop Edward McCarthy Catholic High School in Miami Lakes to collect the shoes, move them, select them, and put them in in boxes.
Today they began to be transported from the patio of the Inguanzo house to Camillus House, an organization dedicated to serving the homeless of Miami-Dade County for almost 60 years and originally created to help the first Cuban exiles.
Camillus House will be in charge of distributing the shoes to people living on the streets or in homeless shelters and to very low-income families.
“You can wash clothes, but broken shoes with holes can only be improved by changing them for another pair,” says Fernández.
Camillus House not only provides shelter, food and the possibility of washing up to the homeless, but also helps them find work and help and for that it is important to present yourself with decent clothing and footwear.
Some of the men’s, women’s and children’s shoes in the boxes were more than decent, but what abounded were the sneakers, many new and with tags.
If a person lives on the street, they need to walk a lot in search of resources, says Fernández, who estimates that in Miami-Dade there are a thousand people in that situation, plus 2,500 who went to live in shelters and are in the process of changing to a life best.
They are much less than in San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles, but in any case a single homeless person is more than there should be in a US city, adds the executive director of Camillus House.
In a statement thanking the “Loving Soles” campaign, Fernandez said, “It has been incredible to see the outpouring of love from the community. In a world plagued by so much negativity, this show of generosity restores hope and faith in humanity.” Perhaps that is the greatest miracle and the greatest impact: that lives change for both the giver and the receiver.”
“LOVING SOLES”
Camila de los Ríos, one of the students from the Archbishop McCarthy Institute who today helped in the operation of loading the boxes and bags with shoes on the truck, shares Fernández’s opinion that footwear is important not only to be able to move from one side to side without hurting your feet.
“It is very important to have a good presence, and shoes are part of that, to be able to change the situation and improve,” he says in a comment to Efe.
De los Ríos, like the rest of his classmates, adolescent boys and girls, wear T-shirts with the legend “Loving Soles”, which means shoe lovers.
Gina Inguanzo explains that it is a play on words between “soles”, soles of the feet and by extension footwear, and “souls”, souls, with which they want to capture this union between shoes and solidarity in which the Miami Lakes students.
The first year the Inguanzo family joined “Loving Soles,” a campaign started in 2011 by Ileana Gutierrez McGoohan and her two teenage sons, they only collected 500 pairs, says Gina Inguanzo.
“This year I would say there are more than 12,000 pairs, there are more inside the house than there are here,” he says, pointing to the large boxes with drawings of hearts and legends such as “Be Kind to the Needy” (Be kind to the needy). ) drawn from the Bible.
Inside the boxes, thousands of shoes awaited an owner whose life would change.
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