Mother, Brenda, Jeffrey, and I had the privilege of working at the Operation Christmas Child processing center in Denver on December 6 for 4 hours. We were sorry we forgot to take our camera, so there are no pictures!
Operation Christmas Child is a ministry of Samaritan's Purse. OCC sends hundreds of thousands of Christmas presents to needy children in other countries. People across America put gifts of all kinds (school supplies, hygiene items, candy, toys, etc.) into shoe boxes and designate the gift for a boy or girl of a certain age group. All the boxes go to one of six processing centers in the US before being shipped. In the processing center volunteers do several things:
1. Take out the money which is donated to Samaritan's Purse for transporting the boxes to foreign countries.
2. Inspect the boxes for inappropriate items. (war toys, snakes, chocolate, food, breakable items, liquid items, used items.) Any of these inappropriate items has to be removed. (They are all donated to other charities in the US. They just can't go overseas.)
3. Replace those items with other donated items: toys, toothbrushes, toothpaste, candy.
4. Tape the shoe box shut.
5. Pack the shoe boxes into big cardboard boxes for transporting.
We worked from 2-6 pm, with another home school girl who went with us. We enjoyed it very much, but were tired by the end. There were many volunteers in the warehouse working while we were there, but we five were a team of our own.
My first job was finding the money, then I taped boxes for the rest of the time. Jeffrey's assignment was to pack the transport boxes at the end. Mother and Brenda were inspecting the boxes and Mother also took out money for Samaritan's Purse.
There were over 500,000 shoe boxes processed in the Denver processing center this year!
Members of our family have participated in this Christmas season volunteer opportunity for 4 years now. We think it is a worthwhile project. We also fill and donate one shoebox (or more) every year. The volunteers have to be 13 to work, so next year Jason will be joining us.
- Beth
