Boxes of joy

WASILLA — “Our garage is full with all of these boxes,” Dianna Boucher exhaled. “It’s been a pretty busy week.”

Dianna Boucher has opened her home, like she and husband Sam have done for the past four years. The Bouchers garage is temporarily transformed into a storage unit for shoeboxes — shoeboxes filled with toys and goodies that will eventually end up on the doorstep of children’s homes across the globe. Their garage has become the Mat-Su Valley’s kick-off center for Operation Christmas Child.

Operation Christmas Child (OCC) is the brain child of American Christian evangelist Franklin Graham, son of the renowned Billy Graham’s, whose vision to have people contribute shoeboxes filled with necessary and fun items, even toothpaste and toys, to be sent to kids around the world.

Graham, president of Semaritan’s Purse, a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization, started OCC in 1993 when 28,000 shoeboxes were delivered to children in war-torn Bosnia. For the past 14 years, Samaritan’s Purse churches and loyal volunteers have collected and distributed more than 46 million boxes to boys and girls in more than 130 countries.

This is how it works. Groups, families and individuals pack shoeboxes with gifts selected for a child of a specific age range and gender, such as boy, 10 to 14 years old or girl, 2 to 4 years old.

The most common items placed in the boxes are school supplies, small toys, hard candy and hygiene products. The boxes are then collected by volunteers and shipped to third-world countries, where they are distributed mostly by National Leadership Teams comprised of pastors and civic leaders drawn from religious, government and community organizations.

In 2006, the program delivered 7.6 million boxes to children in 95 countries, with more than 11,000 of those coming from Alaska; 1,800 from the Mat-Su Valley.

For the last four years in Wasilla, Sam and Dianna Boucher have been involved with OCC, doing their part to bring holiday cheer to children around the world.

“The gifts are for everybody,” said Dianna Boucher, Wasilla relay center coordinator. “It’s hard to get the word out, so most of the response comes from word of mouth.”

Boucher said she received an unexpected visit from a Girl Scout Troop last year, bearing a supply of empty shoeboxes.

This past week was national OCC collection week, where local volunteers met at the Boucher home to package each decorative shoebox into larger boxes to be sent to the Anchorage Baptist Temple. From Anchorage, the boxes are shipped to a processing center in California, where they are inspected and sometimes filled even more before being shipped off to more than 120 countries.

“We really don’t look through the boxes,” Boucher said. “In California, they check them and fill them even more if they feel kind-of light.”

In Soldotna, word of Operation Christmas Child has spread from the home of Mary Jane Mills, OCC’s Alaska coordinator.

Since 2001, Mills has been involved with OCC at what she refers to as “satellite office” in Soldotna. Mills coordinates with collection centers in Juneau, Anchorage and Fairbanks, as well as with The Bouchers in Wasilla, an Eagle River bookstore, Seward, Homer and Big Lake.

“Our family does about 10 boxes each year,” Mills said. “Each of my seven kids fills one up. It’s hard to stop once you start this thing.”

Mills said each individual who donates a shoebox usually does a great job filling it with appropriate goodies, but the OCC headquarters in California guarantees the shoeboxes are chock full of school supplies, hygiene items, hard candy, toys and other personal items.

“They make sure there aren’t any political or inappropriate items in there.” she said. “Stuffed animals, perishables, that kind of stuff. But they don’t want to disturb the integrity of the box, especially when they’ve been wrapped up so nicely.”

Mills said OCC in Alaska has been flying boxes into Russia for the last 10 years to homes in Chukotka, an area roughly the same size as Alaska. This year, instead of Russia, her shoeboxes will go to 1,500 homes in the Alaska Bush, the Philippines and areas in the Western Hemisphere.

“The way to find out where your shoebox goes is to put a letter and a picture in the box asking the family who receives it to respond,” Mills said.

Last year, a grandmother and granddaughter from Hooper Bay wrote Mills back and thanked her for giving the youngster such a wonderful box. In her reply, the elder Alaska women also sent a book about the Kamchatka Penninsula.

“Their home had burnt down that year and they had nothing,” Mills said. “I mean, that sort of thing is really humbling, to hear that you made a difference somehow.”

Last month, Mills put up local posters around Soldotna area stores, produced public service announcement’s for the Christian radio stations and contacted television news crews to get the word out about OCC.

“It’s pretty much a project that carries its own after awhile,” she said. “If you donate a box, you get an invitation to do so again the next year.”

Mills said last year her area pulled in more than 1,000 shoeboxes for OCC.

Back in Wasilla, Dianna Boucher has inspected her garage to assess the generosity.

“We’re kind of down, we think, this year, but there may be some last-minute boxes,” Boucher said. “But no matter what, it’s always a success. It’s amazing how fast the space fills up. We put them in the downstairs basement, to one side, and before you know it the garage started filling up.”

And fill up it did.

By Saturday morning, the Bouchers garage was overflowing with over more than 1,000 donated gift boxes for OCC. Boucher said that aside from word of mouth, minimal advertising and returning donators, local parishes also recruit supporters for OCC on a massive scale. Glacier View Bible Church in Sutton delivered 60 boxes last Monday, Fairview Loop Baptist Church in Wasilla gave 45. Many churches in the Valley are involved in the collection process.

According to Samaritan Purse, Operation Christmas Child is designed to bring joy and hope to children in desperate situations around the world through gift-filled shoeboxes and the “Good News of God’s love.”

“We have the same people who bring us boxes each year,” Boucher said. “Last year this little kid saw the box he had wrapped for a family in need on the cover of the Operation Christmas Child magazine and was all excited about doing it again. That’s always endearing to hear. The kids get attached at first to their gift box and then have to give it up, and it’s so cute to see them realizing it’s for a bigger purpose in the end.”

To find out more about what items can be included in a shoebox for the Operation Christmas Child project, call Dianna Boucher at 373-6451.

Contact J.J. Harrier at valleylife@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.