Street Shoes

On every bus journey I take here in Ecuador I see at least one shoe in the road: usually tatty leather childrens shoes, and not the pair just the one. The person who started the lost shoe project: http://www.thelostshoeproject.com/ thought that there was something really intereting about this phenomenon. does the person not realise that they are missing just one shoe? How did it come to get abandoned by the side of the road?

Some of the shoes are old and worn out, like they´ve been to a lot of places and have been a part of someones identity for quite some time. Others are creaseless and shiny, as though they´ve found their way out of a shop and are on their way somewhere!

I always wonder who they might have belonged to; as Forrest gump says, you can tell a lot about a person by their shoes; Where they´ve been, where they´re going :)

Here is an intersting pair that I saw abandoned in the street where I´m living. I think that the lady they belonged to was one of the Ecuadorian ladies in pastel suits I see working to work on the morning; with bright lipstick and shimmer tights. Not old but not young; the kind who likes Salsa dancing at the bars in the Mariscal on a saturday night; only ever dancing with her husband even though she is bored.

On this particular night the lady was walking home and had a sudden moment of realisation; about what I couldn´t say. She took of her shoes and threw them into the roots of a nearby tree. Smiling, she walked all the way home with no shoes, laddering her tights on the gravel and singing a song that she thought she had forgotten.