Rotary members are shoe-ins for orphan project

An annual project of the Huntsville Rotary Club, and now the Moberly Rotary, is the collection of shoes to donate to the Shoes for Orphan Souls program, a ministry of Buckner International.

The tractor trailer came to Moberly to pick up the contributions from the local clubs – 73 pairs from Moberly and over 360 pairs from the Huntsville Club. This addition added up to nearly 17,000 pairs of shoes with more stops on the way.

Karen Bealmer of the Macon Rotary Club, hopped aboard with Larry Lunsford and John Gill in Macon and drove south with them to meet some of the Randolph County members of District 6040. Lunsford is the “shoe guru” district chair and past district governor in 2001-2002. Gill is the current governor of the Rotary district

The truck had more stops to make before it met the UPS truck in Chillicothe. The shoes would eventually find their way to the children of Haiti.

In past years, shoes went to children in Guatemala and Russia. Bealmer took a trip to Russia and saw first hand the difference a pair of shoes can make in the life of a child.

Shoes for Orphan Souls has distributed more than 1.8 million pairs of shoes to at-risk children in the United States and to orphans in 68 countries around the world. The program began as Shoes for Rusian Souls in 1995 in Dallas, Texas, and was taken over by Buckner International in 1999.

Photo above: Rotary members are from left, Gerald Browning, Moberly Rotary; Karen Bealmer, Macon Rotary; Ed Kimbrough, Huntsville Rotary; Teresa Stackhouse, Moberly; Dan Shepherd, Huntsville Rotary; Richard Tregnago, Huntsville Rotary; John Sommers, president of the Huntsville Rotary Club; Jeff Schulte, Huntsville Rotary; Clay Joiner, Huntsville Rotary; and Tom Robison, Moberly Rotary. In the truck are John Gill, Rotary District 6040 governor and Larry Lunsford, district Shoes for Orphan Souls chair.