New Shoes to Haiti

 

By Christopher Glass/IMA

Finding Claudy Dalegrand’s home isn’t easy.

First, you leave the main road and hop from rock to rock to cross a shallow stream. Then you walk for several minutes down a rocky path as you wind your way through a small community of homes.

A simple nod and a smile allows you safe passage as people step out of their homes to greet visitors.

As you get closer you begin to hear saws and hammers. Claudy’s father Alcant is a carpenter, and he has a workshop just outside the family home. He builds cabinets and chairs mostly; Alcant’s daily wage is about $5.42.

Recently Claudy, 12, received a new pair of shoes from representatives of IMA World Health. It was part of a shoe distribution in the north of the country, just south of Cap Haitien. In one week alone, more than 120,000 pairs of new shoes were distributed to children in need through a partnership with IMA and TOMS Shoes.

TOMS Shoes donated a total of 800,000 pairs of new shoes to children in Haiti this year as part of the partnership. IMA will distribute them as a complement to the ongoing USAID-funded Neglected Tropical Disease program. Through this program, IMA has established a vast network of community volunteers across the country.

Since the agreement was announced in October, these volunteers have been trained and are now fitting children for shoes and helping to track the distribution.

Claudy is one of the first to see the benefits.

These aren’t the first shoes he’s ever owned, but his old shoes were in bad shape and they didn’t fit him well. Poorly fitting shoes can cause blisters, opening the door for infection. If he doesn’t wear shoes at all, it increases the risk for him to pick up soil-transmitted parasites like Hookworm.

Many of us take a pair of properly fitting shoes for granted, but in Claudy’s case it can provide a better, healthier life.

Distributing shoes in partnership with TOMS Shoes is just one of the many ways that IMA is fighting disease and improving lives around the world.

And though the shoe distribution has all the funding it needs, we need your support to continue our other life saving projects in places like Southern Sudan, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to name a few.

IMA has a long history of creating efficient programs and relationships, like our partnership with TOMS Shoes, and finding ways to get the most out of each dollar. For the third year in a row Forbes picked us as one of the 10 most efficient charities in the country.

Will you join us to bring hope and healing to people in need around the world?