My Bare Sole
By: Dani Mirth
Some of the kids from the village
Picture this: A summer day. Dirty feet of all sizes, signifying all ages, all covered in the hard red soil beneath them. They belonged to a group of children living in a rural village hours away from the nearest metropolis. When I first saw them, they were barefoot, running around, playing with one another without a care in the world.
The village I visited. The red soil covered everything.
I had ended up at this village in China as part of a healthcare program to visit and learn about the culture and ideology behind “barefoot doctors.” Their numbers are few and they are scattered throughout remote places. They are often villagers themselves, with varied degrees of medical training. Without much supplies or adequate facilities, there is usually not much they can do for the serious conditions. However, they are the best chance that villagers have against things we sometimes take for granted – treating an infection or stabilizing the patient enough to get them to the nearest hospital that could be more than a day away.
I stood with the other students inside the clinic and listened as the doctor visited with our teachers in Chinese. The clinic was literally a hole in the wall with only a few wooden stools, a table and a locked wooden cabinet that I assumed held all the supplies and medicine for the village. I remembered staring through the holes in my Crocs and wiggling my toes to feel the new sensations of the warm dirt and sand on my feet. The girls next to me were whispering and giggling about their “stinky feet” as we had done a bit of walking on our excursions for the last couple of days. My focus shifted to the doctor. Even in his best attire of black pants and an off-white long sleeve button up, he somehow looked under-dressed in the midst of our casual t-shirt and shorts get-up. He also had on a black pair of sandals. From the look of the wear and tear of the shoes – the dirt still visible under his toenails and the calluses most evident in the heels – I realized that he literally was a barefoot doctor for most of his visits.
My thoughts were cut short by a different set of giggling. The children had gathered in small groups around us with their heads leaned in close together. Their eyes were glued on us. There we were – a group of strangers in strange clothes and shoes. Back home, many of my friends and even my own brother made fun of me for my Crocs. They had a hard time getting onboard with what they claimed to be a bad, if not ugly, trend. Yet in these children’s’ eyes, I didn’t see judgment, but rather a sense of discovery and amazement. I don’t suppose they knew what it felt like to walk in our Crocs, Shox, Converses, Reefs, and so on. Then again, it wasn’t as if I knew how it felt to spend a day in their callus-thickened skins, all coated in dirt.
The bus ride back to our hotel was a long one. I felt uneasy as I let the reality of two worlds with such vast 
discrepancies in living standards, sink in. I stared at my Crocs, unsure what to feel. Out of nowhere, my friend grabbed my right leg and placed it on her lap as she pulled out a pen. On the thick side of my Crocs she signed, “Amy was here” and drew a heart around it. She smiled at me as I stared at the words. Right then and there, it dawned on me that I was focusing on the wrong things. Our experiences and the way we live our lives may be very different, but we all feel the same joy, the same sense of wonder, the same sense of companionship. It was never about having the same shoes, or having shoes at all. It was about realizing that shoes are different in the same way that it is important to be comfortable in your own shoes – no matter how different they are from others’ shoes. To me, my shoes are an extension of who I am, and for the first time in my life, someone else also saw the significance in that. I wasn’t alone.
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