Giving a ‘shoe-in’ for Viden
By LEE PROCIDA
Cherry Hill Sun
2/1/2008

Johnson, Rosa students follow the Footsteps by donating shoes to help needy kids in Africa

One day this past December, Bob Viden presented a Powerpoint slideshow to James H. Johnson Elementary School students of his expeditions to Africa. A few months earlier, he had made a similar presentation at Rosa International Middle School, explaining the program he started called Footsteps, which soon became a success there.

Shortly before he came to Rosa, Viden received a letter from another school, this one in South Africa. The letter thanked him for his help through the Footsteps project, which donates used shoes to needy areas around the world.

Winter in South Africa is the same time as summer here, but it gets just as cold in some areas there as it does in South Jersey. At the school Viden donated to, when students are absent, it is common to assume they did not have any shoes, which is also commonplace. Thanks to Viden, some children there received their first pair of shoes.

Through Footsteps, Viden donated more than 40,000 pairs of shoes to needy areas around the world, and now he was asking the schools in Cherry Hill to help children around the world who value shoes dramatically more than here.

Two days after his presentation at Johnson the donated shoes filled a minivan. Viden will be delivering those pairs through a Catholic mission project in New York to Ghana on the western tip of Africa.

“It really is taking off quite well,” said Caryn Murtha, a former substitute teacher at Johnson who met Viden at church and proposed to start the program at Johnson.

Murtha’s husband teaches at Rosa and the program there was a success, so she thought it would work at Johnson as part of its character education program.

“We’re basically trying to teach the kids about character traits and civic responsibility and respect,” she said. “The things that aren’t tested in school.”

Viden lives in Glassboro and runs the operation out of his business, Bob’s Little Sport Shop, which he operates with help from his wife and children. He first went to Africa in 1984 on a hunting expedition and recently has been going once a year, now with a purpose beyond recreation.

When Viden visited Zaire in 1997 – today the Democratic Republic of Congo – he met a group of missionaries that invited him and his hunting party to a nearby village. The thatched roof huts there had no electricity or running water, and the villagers had no shoes.

The missionaries described to him how the lack of footwear presented dire and avoidable consequences for the villagers, because their bare feet often picked up parasites in the sub-Saharan bush. When Viden met a young boy who asked him to send back shoes, it was the inspiration he needed to make a difference.

Viden said the two organizations he works with most are the Safari Club International and The One Shot Hunt Club, both of which have been instrumental in delivering supplies to needy villages.

The One Shot Hunt Club is chartered in South Africa, where Viden worked with it to deliver shoes.

Footsteps receives donations from as far south as Maryland and as north as New York, which is not bad considering all its advertising is through word of mouth, although Viden said a Web site is in the works. Murtha said she heard a school in Voorhees is picking up the program as well after hearing about it at Johnson.

Anyone interested in donating to Footsteps can contact the Johnson school at 428-8848. A bin will be there for collecting shoes through the school year.