Nov 07
24
Packing Christmas Boxes
Posted by Stephen24
Tags: event, winter
Last night we took the church’s youth group to a warehouse to pack Christmas shoe boxes. This was for Operation Christmas Child, a program run by Samaritan’s Purse to distribute gift boxes to children in third-world countries. The idea is that you take an empty shoe box and fill it with gift items for a child (e.g. Girl, 5-9 years old). Things like coloured pencils and a colouring book, small toys, a toothbrush, a sticker book, and so on. Some people add a Christmas card with a personal message and a photo of themselves or their family. OCC provides empty boxes in case you don’t have an actual shoe box handy. They also encourage you to include a $7 donation to cover the cost of processing and shipping.
Anyway, we ended up inside this huge warehouse where shoe boxes full of gifts were stacked fifteen feet high, in rows running the length of the building. This place processes about 16,000 boxes a night, and has gone through about 130,000 boxes so far this season.
We started of with about fifteen minutes of training: what this was all about, what to do, how to do it. Pretty basic. Then we were herded out to rows of tables where we opened, unpacked, sorted, and repacked boxes all evening.
There were three sections. The first section removed any money from the boxes. Cash, cheques and donation envelopes went through slots into safe boxes. The second section removed any banned items from the boxes (such as food, liquids, glass, toy guns). The third section was called the shoe box hospital, and it added extra items to boxes that had little in them.
Shoe boxes eventually went into bigger boxes, themselves stacked on wooden pallets, wrapped in plastic, and loaded onto trucks to be shipped by container to Africa, Central and South America.
It was fascinating to see what people put into the boxes. Often I’d smile thinking about how much fun a child would have opening this box and discovering all that was in it. There’d be boxes for girls, full of pink, frilly, glittery things that surely no girl could resist. There’d be boxes for boys, with Hot Wheels monster trucks, small screwdriver, pliers and hammer, and a baseball cap. Boy stuff.
Sometimes the box would be so full, and so carefully packed there wasn’t a cubic millimeter of free space, and there was only one possible way things could go in. I’d admire the skill of the packer and ruefully unpack the box, knowing there was absolutely no way I could possibly put things back as well as they were originally packed.
The evening involved a lot of manual labour, with little thought required once you got into the swing of things. All the workers were crammed close together along the tables, so it was an evening of talking with my neighbours, laughing, telling stories, discussing ideas. The work force was predominantly late teens, early twenties–youth-group age. A lively, chatty bunch. It was fun.
