Selling shoes for Iraqi children with heart disease

Jeremy Courtney, co-founder of Preemptive Love Coalition.

Photo: Farah Nosh

In 2007, Jeremy Courtney of Waco, Texas, moved from Turkey to Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq to work for an aid organization. There he met a family whose teenaged daughter was on a waiting list for surgery to correct a congenital heart defect. Pediatric heart disease is widespread among the Kurds of northern Iraq, perhaps due to the after-effects of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s 1988 chemical attacks or the intra-family marriages common among some tribal societies. Courtney discovered there are an estimated 4,000 Kurdish children suffering from congenital heart problems; these kids tire easily, can’t run and play with friends and are prone to fainting from low blood-oxygen levels. No hospital in Iraq is equipped to perform the necessary operation, and the travel and medical costs required for surgery abroad are double the average Iraqi family’s annual income. So Courtney decided to help this girl and others like her. “Soldiers and diplomats cannot solve everything,” he says. “Some things can only be solved by hands-on charity, commerce and creativity.”

He co-founded the Preemptive Love Coalition (PLC) with his wife, Jessica, and a friend, Cody Fisher. So far, PLC has raised enough money to help 27 families send children to hospitals abroad—mainly in Turkey and Israel—for the life-saving surgery. A portion of PLC’s budget comes from selling shoes made by the Kurdish families PLC employs. Sold only on the organization’s website, the shoes have a unique feature that makes them a perfect symbol of PLC’s efforts: They fit either foot; there is no right or left. “They represent our desire to avoid taking sides,” says Courtney. “These shoes make it possible to bring Muslims, Christians and Jews, Arabs, Kurds, Brits and Americans back together.”

Jeremy Courtney now blogs for Ode at odemagazine.com/jeremycourtney.

If the shoe fits...