a small plastic chair wearing a puffy purple coat and glasses. Natasha Votyakova, the director of Buckner Russia, kneels at the girl’s feet, fitting her with new shoes. The image has been used many times on promotional materials since it was first taken at Orphanage #40 in St. Petersburg in the early 2000s. It’s featured in the current Shoe Drive Coordinator’s Guide all people receive when they sign up to host a shoe drive with Buckner Shoes for Orphan Souls®
A . For that little girl and for the thousands of orphan
children who receive new shoes each year through Buckner, the feeling of a new pair of shoes given especially to them provides a moment of hope, light
grainy photograph from Buckner archives shows a young Russian girl sitting in
and reprieve from the oppressive gloom of life lived in an institution.
When Ray and Martha Delawder speak in churches to promote Grace Memorial Community Church’s annual area shoe drive, they sometimes are asked, “Whatever happens to these orphan children?” With a smile, they point to the picture of the girl in the purple coat and say, “We don’t know the story of every child who gets a new pair of shoes, but we can tell you about this one.”
••• Grace Memorial Community Church celebrated
their 15th year of shoe drives in July. A small church in Cumberland, Md., they stumbled into shoe collecting almost by accident when one of their past members, Bev Cook, was catching up with a friend back home in Texas during a phone call.
“My friend said, ‘I heard Buckner is going to have a shoe drive and they’re going to take a trip to St. Petersburg, Russia. They’re using the radio now to try to collect shoes to take for the orphanages.’ She told me the whole story,” Bev says. “I called my husband Clint and said, ‘I really want to go on this trip.’ He said OK. {continued on page 30}
28 Buckner Today • WINTER 2015 ISSUE
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