How Are the Shoebox Gifts Distributed to the Children Who Need Them?

This is an excellent question, and one that could be answered many different ways. After all, Operation Christmas Child distributed nearly 8 million shoebox gifts in 2008-2009, and will likely exceed 8 million in this year's collection for 2009-2010.

Your shoebox gift(s) are collected at a local church or business, forwarded to a regional city (in our case, usually Tulsa), and then forwarded to one of the 6 Samaritan's Purse Operation Christmas Child regional processing centers scattered across the United States. The closest one to us is Denver, and there are 'home missions' opportunities for volunteers to help with processing during December. That might be the subject of a future post.

At the regional processing centers, your shoebox gift undergoes final processing to meet OCC's guidelines and to prepare it for shipping. It is my understanding that the #1 desire of the processing crews is to only seal the box to prevent shipping damage. However, the processing crews might remove prohibited objects such as liquids, war-related toy items, or other inappropriate content. Unwrapped shoebox gifts are then wrapped with a thematic wrapping material for final shipping.

I am very unacquainted with the logistics and timing of final delivery to villages and cities of the recipient countries. I'm almost certain that Samaritan's Purse has to 'declare' these goods at some checkpoint as they enter countries. Samaritan's Purse will 'network' with their own missionaries and cooperate with other missions staff to optimize a gift delivery to a village's children.

The video below shows how the final shoebox delivery might look in an impoverished village. In this case, the delivery occurs in Kamenica, in the war-torn country of Kosovo. Also, in this case, the uploaded video is very raw. I sought out and chose such a video for a reason. I wanted our participants to see a 'real' shoebox gift distribution, free of professional editing, musical backgrounds, perfect weather, etc. I personally have nothing against the 'official videos' and will gladly show them, but I wanted to show a more realistic presentation of a typical gift distribution.