7:48am Monday 31st March 2008
By Ben Barnett
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."
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