Just under 800 children will have a brighter Christmas thanks to the generosity of Barrhead area residents.
That is what Derra Mantey, one of the organizers of Barrhead’s Samaritans Purse’s Operation Christmas Child campaign told the Barrhead Leader.
Operation Christmas Child is a project run by Samaritans Purse Canada, a non-denominational evangelical Christian organization, founded in 1970 that provides spiritual and physical aid to people in need.
“Once again I just want to thank Barrhead and area residents for overwhelming support,” Mantey said, adding that while this year’s total [792] is slightly down from last year’s 795 it is actually above the organization’s 10 year 774 average.
She also noted the Barrhead numbers do not include any of the boxes people chose to build online.
“I just want to thank everyone who took the time and effort to give from their hearts and donate a shoebox and to everyone who helped get them ready to ship,” she said. “I don’t think people can really understand what a difference these boxes can actually make in these children’s lives. I know the children don’t actually get the boxes on Christmas, when they do, it truly is a Christmas gift.”
Over the 10 years the Manteys have been organizing Operation Christmas Child efforts through the Alliance Church, area residents have donated 7,737 shoe boxes.
The project’s mission is to fill shoeboxes with Christmas gifts for needy children in desperate situations around the world. Since the program’s beginnings in 1990 the charity has helped deliver more than 146 million shoeboxes to kids in over 135 countries. Last year in Canada 664,525 were collected.
This year Canadian boxes will go to Central America (Costa Rica El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and Nicaragua and Africa (Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast Senegal and Sierra Leone).
Due to the number of people displaced because of the military incursion into the country by Russia, for the third-straight year Samaritans Purse asked Canadians to contribute 20,000 extra boxes containing cold weather items, which would go directly to Ukraine. Many of the cold weather boxes included homemade crafted clothing from Barrhead residents, including many from Hillcrest Lodge knitting circle.
