Locations and Lessons

This is what the maps in the email will look like
showing where all shoeboxes were distributed

After the Operation Christmas Child shoebox campaign 2011/2012, we were able to tell shoebox donors who gave their £2.50 shoebox donation online which country their shoeboxes went to. This proved very popular and was one of the most successful 'email blasts' we have ever done. We are going to send those donors another email this week. It will contain an update from that country and a map showing the various locations the shoeboxes reached in each country.

It was my job to read through the reports from our partners in each country to get quotes and stats for these emails. I also had to find the towns and villages where shoeboxes had been distributed across the 12 countries in eastern Europe, FSU and Africa. Google Maps came in very handy for this; I learned a new technical skill and improved my geography no end!

In some countries, such as Liberia, matching up the location our partners had described to the maps was a frustrating and time consuming task. I got there in the end and hopefully, our donors will enjoy this extra information and their map. I guess they could go into Google and click that little yellow man to zoom in to see the places for themselves.. such are the wonders of our technological world.

If you would like to take part in Operation Christmas Child this year and would like to know where your shoebox goes, here's where to start  and you can even make a shoebox from the comfort of your home without doing all that tedious shopping around and thinking up of ideas with the amazing 'Shoebox World' 

Barefoot in Minus Five Degrees

Part of my job with Samaritan's Purse involves reading the stories in the shoebox distribution reports and it reminds me how fortunate and grateful I am that I have such an interesting job, which perhaps makes a tiny difference in the world.  Some of the most harrowing stories of Operation Christmas Child distributions were from Romania, which is a country where poverty still bites hard particularly in rural areas. This one is an example written by our partners:


"Getting to the village of Mosoroasa in Romania is very difficult. You need to follow a rutted track and when it rains even this is impassable. These children live in very poor conditions, which are hard to imagine. They don’t have running water, electricity or the facilities for a normal life.

"But when we brought the shoeboxes, we could see extraordinary joy reflected in their faces. The shoeboxes are not just presents. For the poor families, the items in the shoeboxes cover some of the children’s needs for school and provide warmth and clothing.

Our partners continued, “Looking back, we do not remember the hard work or the obstacles we faced, but we do remember the faces of those children which radiated joy when they were holding the shoebox in their hands even though they were barefoot when it was -5 Celsius.

“We remember the tears of the mothers running down the muddy streets to thank us because we went to her poor house. It was a campaign in which God's grace upon us was fully manifested, we are blessed that we are part of the OCC team.”

If you would like to give a shoebox this year here's where to start - or you can even give a shoebox this year without leaving your armchair via Shoebox World

ABC of OCC - P

Romania, Dec 1990 Paul Wilcox in 1990 -
this is the very first image
taken of children with  OCC shoeboxes.

P is for photos. It has been my privilege over the years to be on the 'front line' as images of children joyously receiving their shoeboxes come into the OCC office. In the pre-digital age, the actual prints used to be very precious: I remember choosing prints from contact sheets, ordering many copies which were then sent to newspapers with a plea for them to return the print!

It has been a pleasure to see the work of wonderful photographers such as Jonty Wilde, David Lund, Nigel Dobson and many more.

In the digital age of course, it became conveniently easy to duplicate an image to share the joy of the child - almost instantly. However, the sheer number of images was almost a disadvantage, as everyone on OCC trips took many photos (usually of the same child). They were no longer restricted by the number of shots they had left on their film, so it was not unusual to get a CD containing over 1000 shots from one five-day trip which collated all the images taken by team members. Ploughing through these discs took hours, but of course, produced wonderful results.


Belarus, Dec 2010 Linda Thompson
A sick, abandoned child in hospital
loves his teddy


Now there are more changes as sites such as Facebook and Flickr mean that photographs are easily available to everyone. I have to keep a keen eye on Facebook along with everyone else to see the first images. This is wonderful, but also means that we cannot keep images exclusive to those who perhaps 'deserve' to see them first. The hardworking Area Co-ordinators and drivers who are the driving force behind getting the boxes to the children should perhaps be the first to see the first child get a box, but it is sadly no longer possible to do this. Such is progress: we re-balance our expectations to accommodate changes which can only be to the good.

You can see collections of OCC photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/samaritanspurseuk/