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Make Shoes, Not WarA graduate who is stepping up to save lives
By Claire St. Amant
Few people can honestly list saving lives in their job description, but
Jeremy Courtney, MDiv '04, is one of them. No, he isn't a doctor, a
police officer, a firefighter, or an EMT. He's a shoe salesman in
Northern Iraq.
Since July 2007, Courtney and his wife, Jessica--along with Scott Bertrand '99, MDiv '03; Michelle Bailey '04; and a
team of others--have sent more than twenty children to Israel for
life-saving heart surgeries, and it only took 350 pairs of handmade
shoes to do it. Formerly known as "Buy Shoes. Save Lives," the business
recently re-incorporated as the Preemptive Love Coalition, and Courtney
and his team are pursuing non-profit status.
"I realized that I did not want our fifteen minutes in anyone's
spotlight to terminate with the message 'Buy Shoes. Save Lives,'"
Courtney said. "That was far too small a thing to say. The message of
preemptive love and that of loving our enemies, on the other hand, is
central to the life and message of Jesus Christ."
Courtney considers peacemaking essential to his mission in Iraq. "Shoes
are not the point," he said. "The money they help raise for heart
surgeries is not even the only point. It seemed fitting that a
traditional Kurdish shoe become a mascot of peace among these
communities at odds in hopes that we all get a better sense of what it
means to walk a mile--and then the extra mile--in another's shoes."
The conduit for peace is an unassuming pair of woven shoes called
"klash," which have been handmade by the Kurdish people for centuries.
Courtney estimates that in the last year, funds from the shoes, which
sell worldwide for $100 a pair, have pumped between $20,000 to $25,000
consumer dollars into the Iraqi economy. Courtney and his team, all of
whom work for free, raise their own support through churches in the
United States and in Iraq.
This summer, two current Baylor students, Angel Rasco and Audrey
Waggoner, joined Courtney for a six-week internship. "It's great to see
a different side of Iraq than what people hear on the news," Waggoner
said.
While the shoes' construction is low-tech, the entire marketing process
is a feat. The $100 price tag is necessary to cover costs and send
children to Israel for treatment of the genetic heart conditions
experts think were created because of the chemical weapons Saddam
Hussein used against his own people in the late 1980s.
Besides shoes, the coalition also sells T-shirts and bracelets and
accepts donations. "Business in Iraq is just difficult," Courtney said,
and astronomical shipping costs add to the tally.
The team travels through the mountainous Iraq-Iran border region to
have the shoes made by skilled Kurdish craftsmen and women. It takes
about thirty hours to complete one shoe, which consists of thousands
and thousands of hand-sewn knots. "We have to navigate all of these
things on a different cultural map encoded in a challenging language,"
Bertrand said. "Head, heart, hands . . . there's not much of you that
isn't worn out by the end of each day."
In addition to physical and emotional strains, the coalition faces
opposition of another kind. "The greatest obstacles we face range from
the mundane to the amazing, such as religious clerics who issue death
warrants for all those who take Muslim children to Israel for heart
surgeries," Courtney said.
Courtney and his wife lived in Turkey for two years before accepting a
friend's invitation to Northern Iraq. "There was something of the voice
of God in his three-line e-mail invitation that stirred a fire in my
heart," Courtney said.
Now at their one-year anniversary in Iraq, twenty-eight-year-old
Courtney has big plans for the future. "In ten years, I see thousands
of Americans and Europeans walking around in fabulously fashionable,
philanthropic klash," he said. "I see the Preemptive Love Coalition
operating off of a multi-million-dollar endowment. I no longer see a
list of three thousand children in northern Iraq alone who are waiting
for heart surgeries."
Courtney also dreams of a pediatric cardiology center in northern Iraq
with Kurdish and Arabic surgeons. The trips to Israel won't have been
in vain, though. "I think public perception of Jews and Israel in Iraq
will be different in ten years," he said, "with hundreds and thousands
of families having had their lives saved at the hands of loving Israeli
doctors."
To find out more, or to see how you can help, go to preemptivelove.org.
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