Project Gettysburg Leon’s sister city relationship with Nicaragua has supported many things over the years, including potable water for impoverished rural communities, education programs for at-risk youth and food gardens projects to improve nutrition. PGL has supported delegations going to Nicaragua and vice-versa for cultural exchanges. A recent project supported by PGL is the initiative of a young Nicaraguan woman named Perla Coronado. Perla began working with PGL while she was in college, at first in support of the PGL food garden project at the school for children with disabilities in the urban barrio of Sutiaba.
Perla herself grew up in a low-income family but was always aware of the many families in her community or nearby that were even worse off. In particular, she saw that many children around her did not have shoes. A commodity like shoes seems commonplace in other parts of the world, but in parts of Nicaragua this simply isn’t so. In places such as the barrio named Tomas Borges where Perla worked as a tutor for children, the proximity to the city trash dump and the lack of proper latrines meant kids were continuously injuring their feet or were contracting illnesses from going barefoot. She approached PGL with an idea to provide children with durable, handmade shoes put together by local Nicaraguans using recycled materials.
Perla named her project No More Bare Feet. With PGL’s help, she has contributed over eighty pairs of shoes to children in the Tomas Borges community and to children at the pre-school and orphanage that PGL supports by buying food for the children there. In her own words, “My goal with “No More Bare Feet” is that every child who needs shoes in these communities receives a pair, shoes that are made tough so that they’ll last. Parents or guardians sign an agreement not to resell the shoes. When a boy or girl outgrows their shoes, they pass them along to another child or a sibling. We follow up on that. This is something I have dreamed of doing since I was a child myself. I always had shoes, but I always saw so many children my age who did not. I didn’t want to just see that and ignore it. I wanted to do something about it.”
Perla recruited volunteers from the university where she graduated in 2023 to help with this project and to make the distribution of the shoes into an event that included piñatas, healthy food and games. With some of the funds she received from PGL, she also bought school supplies for the children. To visualize this work, she asked a friend to make a video that is available online.
Perla and the children she works with send their gratitude to Gettysburg for their help in getting this project from idea to reality. Project Gettysburg Leon also sends their thanks to the community in Gettysburg and Adams County, for your almost forty years of support for work such as No More Bare Feet.
Gregory Bowles
Greg Bowles is the current director for Project Gettysburg Leon, the sister city program between Gettysburg and the country of Nicaragua that was founded in 1986.
