FORT BENNING, Ga. - It started as an e-mail between friends. It ended Feb. 12 with a vanload of shoes headed for earthquake victims in Haiti.
Lillian Serna, an administrative assistant in the Martin Army Community Hospital's Patient Administration Division, obtained permission to collect donations for Soles4Souls - a Nashville, Tenn.-based, nonprofit charity providing shoes to people in need across the globe - and immediately set out collection boxes.
Serna decorated the largest box, four-feet square and three feet high, to resemble the Haitian flag and set it in the hospital lobby.
"When I showed Colonel Nishimura the box, he said it would be funny if I got a thousand pairs," Serna said. "By the end of the first day, it was full. The box was overflowing every day."
MACH patients and staff brought shoes by the bagful and boxful. Serna said an employee from the Santa Fe Child Development Center came to the hospital for an appointment, saw the box, and started a shoe drive there. A MACH employee's daughter started a shoe drive with her Girl Scout Troop and had her father deliver the shoes from Peachtree City. By the end of the first four days of the drive, Serna estimated there were already 1,000 pairs of shoes.
She said she was happy with the drive and had some encounters with people who were as excited about the shoes as she was.
"I collected shoes from the box one morning and went down the hall," Serna said. "When I came back through, there was a man in the lobby who was concerned someone was taking the shoes. He had just put them in and then they were gone. It was just me and it was OK."
Serna took the shoes back to her office, where she sprayed the used pairs to make sure they smelled fresh, tied shoes together with twine to make sure they arrived in pairs, and filled an entire room with bags and bags of sorted and counted shoes. Many of the shoes, she said, were new - especially the children's shoes.
Mona Thorington, a clerk in the Central Appointments Office, purchased the shoe spray and said she was happy to help Haiti in any way she could. Thorington, a Haitian native who came to the United States in 1986, still has many family members in Haiti, including her sister.
"My family is OK," she said. "They are alive, thankfully, but my sister's house collapsed. I feel fortunate and blessed to be here and want to find ways to help."
On her last trip to visit her sister in November, she was able to visit the church where she was baptized and married. The church, like her sister's house, did not withstand the earthquake.
"It's really tough there," Thorington said. "The shoe drive was a great gesture. The response was wonderful and will be really good for the people, especially for the children."
Serna made sure Thorington accompanied the more than 2,000 shoes to the central collection point at the Columbus Airport.
"We collected a lot of shoes," Serna said, "but what a better blessing than to have her escort them."
Although the drive ended Feb. 12, Serna said the donations keep coming in.
More than 200 pairs of shoes were donated to the House of Mercy, a Columbus charity.
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