Nora steps up again to help needy
 |
| Nora Kilcoyne with a pair of the shoes she has collected |
To get to the lawn mower in her garage Nora Kilcoyne would have to climb over hundreds of boxes of shoes and trainers.
It's not that she has a shoe fetish; this is the result of a charitable mind at work.
The retired Irish woman, of Sandy Lane, Bradford, amassed up to 500 pairs of brand-new shoes to be loaded on a truck and driven to Eastern Europe.
In a few days, the lorry will make its way into the Ukraine, where the footwear will be given to men, women and children in dire need of donations like these.
This is not the first time aid worker Nora, a grandmother, has taken it upon herself to help the needy.
She may have stayed at home this time, but Nora estimates she has travelled to Bosnia and Herzegovina about 30 times, as well as making trips to Romania, to provide destitute communities with supplies of food, toiletries, medicine and clothes.
Her latest effort came about after a conversation with a friend at church. Aware of her dedicated history of charity work, he offered surplus stock, otherwise destined for waste, from a factory he works at in Sheffield.
A recent fall has left Nora with a broken ankle but even that did not get in the way of her drive to help others less fortunate than her.
She said: "Having a foot in plaster doesn't stop me. I've been collecting for charities all my life.
"I have been abroad that many times and I have seen the need for charity."
Her overseas deliveries began more than 25 years ago after a customer at Bradford's Victoria Hotel bar, where she was working, told her about a Romanian orphanage he had visited.
Among her proudest achievements is getting a home for the elderly built in Mostar, a particularly war-torn area of Bosnia.
There have been some difficult encounters for Nora over the years. She was threatened with having her throat cut, while her driver had a gun pointed at his head at the Bosnian border."
7:48am Monday 31st March 2008
Print 
Email this 
Comment
What are these links for?
If you liked this article and would like to share it with others on the web who might be searching for good content we've made it easy for you to do it.
At the bottom of all articles, you'll see links to six sites. These sites - commonly called 'social bookmark' or 'social news' sites - have large communities of web users who share and rate interesting, useful and fun things on the web.
Clicking the links will automatically add the address of the story you are reading to one of these sites, letting you share it with others. Each site will ask you to register to share stories. Registration is free and once a member, you can store, recommend and search for stories that interest you.
More on Digg
More on del.icio.us
More on Furl
More on reddit
More on NowPublic/
More on Yahoo!
