She's hobbling around on crutches, with her leg in plaster, but that hasn't stopped Norah Kilcoyne from organising a delivery of overseas aid from her living room.

Despite a recent fall leaving her with a broken ankle, Norah has managed to get 500 pairs of shoes packed up ready to deliver to orphanages in Ukraine.

"It's driving me mad sitting at home, I can't wait to get my leg out of plaster!" says the Bradford grandmother, who has spent the past two decades delivering aid to Eastern European countries.

This is a woman who stood up to soldiers threatening to cut her throat as she travelled through war-torn Bosnia.

Grandmother Norah, of Sandy Lane, started delivering aid overseas 25 years ago after a customer at Bradford's Great Victoria Hotel, where she was working, told her about a Romanian orphanage he'd visited. Norah travelled to Romania and Bosnia taking toiletries, food and medicine, and got involved in a project to build an elderly people's home near Mostar, an area of Bosnia-Herzegovina badly hit by the 1990s Balkans war.

Now Norah is helping Bradford-based charity Take Hope Yorkshire, which delivers aid to orphanages in Ukraine.

"I heard about it from my son, Tony, who met Andrew McVeigh, the director of Take Hope, at his church," says Norah. "Next thing I knew Andrew, Tony, and my grandsons were loading up a truck with shoes I'd been storing in my garage. They'll be sent out to Ukraine, where there's a desperate need. Children in the orphanages get one new pair every three years."

The shoes came from Sheffield company Blanchford Orthopaedics. "They're surplus stock," says Norah. "I'd already taken some to Bosnia for homeless families."

Norah is returning to Bosnia in June and plans to visit Ukraine later this year. "When you've seen what I've seen, you do all you can to help people," she says. "In Bosnia the war had a devastating effect on families. It's still being felt. Some people lost everything and were left with no support. The rebuilding programme is a long process.

"I met old people who'd lost families and had homes destroyed. They ended up on the streets or living in filthy shacks with leaking roofs and no electricity. We found people on the roadside with broken bones, crippled with arthritis. They'd point at photographs of their families and cry." Her first visit to Bosnia nearly cost Norah her life, but she continues to travel there several times a year with donations of toiletries, dried food, shoes, clothes, bedding and basic medical supplies.

"I was travelling across a Muslim part of the country in a lorry delivering aid to Serbs when the driver and I were held up at gunpoint by soldiers," she recalls. "They threatened to shoot him and cut my throat. I just kept smiling and talking. One of the soldiers spoke broken English and I asked if any of them had babies. He said yes, so I took boxes of baby food out of the lorry and handed them over. Eventually they let us go back.

"I learned then that you don't always get from A to B in Bosnia but the aid still ends up somewhere it's needed!"

Now Norah is keen to help people in Ukraine too. Take Hope Yorkshire, based in Denholme, delivers aid to Transcarpathia, an area in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains in Western Ukraine. Andrew McVeigh, from Birstall, has been going out there since 1999, helping international charity Caritas work with two orphanages and a centre for children with disabilities. "We're currently aiming to build a medical centre and dining area for one of the orphanages," he says. "Conditions are very basic. I couldn't believe it when I first went there. These children are just forgotten about, and Ukraine is a forgotten part of Europe. It's a country of natural beauty but it's blighted with poverty."

He says since it got independence in 1992, the country has suffered natural, social and economic disasters. The Soviet withdrawal left an unemployment rate of 89 per cent, without any recognised healthcare or social help.

"People were left with two hours of electricity a day in the thick of winter. The floods in 2000 destroyed villages.

"Over the years it has been finding its feet as an independent country, and I've seen shops and businesses springing up since I started going there. The infrastructure is building up gradually but it's a long process."

Take Hope's projects include raising funds for more than 100 new beds and new toilet blocks. "The present facilities are horrific," he says. "Teenage girls have to use open toilets and rip bedsheets up for sanitary towels. There are 130 children in one orphanage and 102 in the other. The centre for disabled children is the only one in the region, which is about the size of Yorkshire."

When they reach the age of 17, youngsters have to leave the orphanages, and Andrew says a staggering 80 per cent end up dead within a few years. "They go through the system with no mainstream education then they're kicked out, with no support," he says. "Many of them get into drugs and prostitution and end up on the streets. The most vulnerable are the ones with special needs. They have no chance of getting a job and they have no financial assistance.

"We've established good links out there with medics and community organisations. We take aid and support projects through funding. The people are very resourceful - we work with a soup kitchen and the staff grow their own vegetables and keep pigs. They go out on bikes to feed nearly 200 families a day. We've sent bicycles and bike parts out there."

Andrew recently returned from a week in Ukraine where he was filmed by a television crew. He went there with Aidan Williams, retained liaison manager for West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, which had donated fire equipment to firefighters in the Ukraine.

"Our partnership with West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service started in 2005, when it generously donated used firefighting equipment and uniforms which we shipped to the fire service in Vinogradiv, Ukraine," says Andrew. "The fire service director there was deeply moved at the humanitarian aid between fellow firefighters. The brigade over there is in desperate need of equipment. It's like going back in time. Their fire engines are like something from the 1940s."

Andrew, who worked in sales in Eastern Europe, was inspired to set up Take Hope after visiting Romanian orphanages. "I met my old headmistress from St Patrick's School in Birstall. She's a nun running a soup kitchen in Transylvania."

Take Hope was founded to make a difference to the lives of displaced people in the former Yugoslavian states, Romania and the Ukraine. Coincidentally, Andrew has worked in the same region of Bosnia and with the same charity as Norah. "I discovered an American nun called Sister Muriel based in Medugorje. She'd drive up into the mountains delivering boxes of food to old people living in shacks," says Andrew.

He says that as well as the bigger projects, it's the small gestures that have made a difference.

"We bought a music centre and a TV for the children's centre. Before that they didn't have any entertainment," he says. "Children at my church, Our Lady of Lourdes in Haworth, collected soft toys for them. We sent 220 wheelchairs out there. They'd never seen a wheelchair before and were overjoyed.

"The next phase of our work is to send volunteers to Transcarpathia to help the community interact with the children. At the moment they're kept separately so there are many misconceptions about them."

  • For more information about Take Hope Yorkshire visit takehope.org.uk