Shoe-box ministry spreads joy to kids around the world

For as long as she can remember, 10-year-old Julia Padilla has packed Christmas shoe boxes for people around the world. People she’s never met.

“It helps other kids,” she says. “I hope that when they grow up, they hope to send more to other kids in need.”

Her mother, Jamie Padilla, said both Julia and her sister Makena, age 6, see box-packing as serious business — sometimes requiring correction of “Mom” when it comes to putting Barbie in the wrong box, or deciding which box goes to which kid.

“They have a sense of what God’s telling them to put in the box,” Padilla says.

In 2013, she and her daughters made three boxes for boys, filled only with baseball items, including gloves, a uniform and a hat.

“It’s not the same every year for us,” she adds.

Through the years, the family has funneled all those Christmas shoe boxes through Operation Christmas Child, a project of Samaritan’s Purse, which describes itself as a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization.

Its website states that the organization uses its worldwide reach to provide food, medicine and the Gospel to those who are suffering.

Samaritan’s Purse spokeswoman Emily Rios says Southern Nevadans collected 16,632 shoe boxes in 2013. The goal for Southern Nevada in 2014 is 19,000. During the upcoming drop-off week, which runs Monday through Nov. 24, Southern Nevadans can drop off boxes at seven sites.

The 2014 goal for Samaritan’s Purse is to collect 10 million shoe boxes. And, Susan Elliott, a volunteer church relations coordinator with the Operation Christmas Child Las Vegas team and a relay center coordinator at Meadows Fellowship in Las Vegas, says nearly 10 million boxes from all over the world were collected last year.

Boxes are filled with such things as toys, school supplies, hygiene items, T-shirts, socks, watches and hair clips.

Elliott packed her first box 14 years ago, and was hooked; she became a volunteer the following year. Her years of service to the project culminated this year in being chosen to help distribute boxes in Rwanda for a week stretching from the end of this past April into the beginning of May. Being chosen by Operation Christmas Child to personally distribute boxes is considered a once-in-a-lifetime honor, she says.

Elliott estimates she saw 400 to 500 children with her team as she traveled through Rwanda making two distributions per day and teaching biblical information that included stories and skits. What she learned from the experience: “The power of children. The power of the shoe box.”

Although the boxes are often filled with simple items that Americans take for granted, “99 percent of the time, it’s their first gift in their entire life,” she says.

Elliott’s very “first” child on the trip needed help opening her shoe box. She was about 5, and didn’t know how to play with the toy inside.

“I had to teach her how to put her play jewelry on, and what it was,” Elliott recalled. “And candy. Just overjoyed to have a piece of candy.”

“They just get these big giant smiles on their face,” she added. “The majority of them didn’t speak English, but we all know what a smile is.”

Nanor Balabanian received her first Christmas shoe box in 1995, when she was 5. She was living in postwar Lebanon, in the village of Anjar. She received a second box in 1998.

She now teaches world history to ninth-graders in the Bay Area. As a recipient of the Woodrow Wilson-Rockefeller Brothers Fund Fellowship for Aspiring Teachers of Color, she teaches in an underprivileged community that reminds her of where she grew up.

And on the day she opened a Christmas shoe box, her focus riveted on the African-American Barbie inside. At an Operation Christmas Child countdown event in October at Life Springs Christian Church, in Las Vegas, where Balabanian presented her story, she carefully unpacked the Barbie. She’d received it from Heather Roberts of Ohio in 1998.

“I had never seen a black Barbie before,” she said. “I like the person who sent this because they realized that not everyone in the world was white.”

Roberts is Balabanian’s age. She’d also included in the box a necklace with sentimental value, and a picture of herself, her family and her dogs.

“I would just look at these pictures for hours,” Balabanian said. “Imagine their lives, their dog, their backyard.”

Like Balabanian, Roberts grew up to be a teacher. Although they’ve never met, they’ve exchanged gifts over the years and have carried on a 16-year pen pal relationship.

For Balabanian, Christmas shoe boxes weren’t only about the starry-eyed yearning for the American promise of endless Disneylands and fields of Barbies. The magic was also in knowing that someone who didn’t know you had packed and personalized a box just for you.

Dax Fellows, 14, still remembers the time he personalized a box with a stuffed animal he liked but knew he no longer needed. He tracked the box online and discovered that a little boy in the Philippines had received it. His goal, this year, is to pack 80 to 100 boxes.

“It gives you a good feeling to know that you’re helping someone who has never received a present for their birthday,” he says.

Elliott says distribution of boxes takes the entire year, with legalities causing more delays in some countries.

Not that box-packers should throw their hands up and surrender. When Balabanian saw people at her church packing shoe boxes, she decided to join in. Then she gathered her college friends together at a shoe-box-packing party. In 2013, she and her ninth-graders, along with students from their sister school, sent 60 boxes. That’s the beauty of Operation Christmas Child, she says.

“It sends these boxes and hopes that people who get them are also becoming givers, not just getters,” she says.