Operation Christmas Child

Saturday I left at 5:30am to travel to Minneapolis with our youth pastor, five other youth leaders, and forty-some teenagers to work in the Operation Christmas Child processing warehouse. And it was an experience I will never forget!

The trip up was exciting enough. How can it not be when traveling with teenagers? Each van had a walkie talkie and two of them had some kind of contest going on. First they tried to pass a CD between them and the wind just sucked that right away!! Then it was a Snickers candy bar…then it was Jolly Ranchers. They were unsuccessful in their quest to get anything from one van to the other…

Soon we arrived at the Processing Center and after finding the restrooms we were directed to a room where we received a nametag and watched a training video with other volunteers. After the video we were divided up into groups and assigned to work in various roles in the warehouse. Some were chosen to work in the pre-sort section. This is where financial donations are removed and volunteers make sure each box has a boy/girl label. Then they sort the boxes and stack them on wooden pallets based on the age of the child they are intended for.

My group was chosen to work on the inspection lines. Here, we looked through the boxes and took out anything that might spill or melt or otherwise be inappropriate, like war-related stuff. Lots of tootsie rolls came out…that seemed to be the candy of choice. It was very cool to see all the gifts people pack into the boxes and to imagine how excited kids on the other side of the world are going to be when they open them. Some people even put a family picture and a letter in their box. But what was very cool for me was realizing that I was the last person to see and touch the contents of these boxes. And that the next person to touch and see them would be the child who received the box!

Once we inspected the boxes we sent them down the line and they were packed into large cartons that would be taken that day to the airport and shipped out. We were told that the boxes we were inspecting would be sent to Iraq.

This is one of six processing centers around the country and at this one they received close to 700,000 shoeboxes to sort. They had been doing this every day for the last three weeks and they were looking to us to help finish up the last 40,000. We did not disappoint…and when there were no more shoeboxes some of the kids actually groaned! They had a great time. In fact, we spent the remaining part of our day at the Mall of America and some kids actually told me they had more fun at the Processing Center than at the Mall of America…that’s cool. And several kids, and adults, hoped that this would become a tradition for us.