Children in Antigua open their shoebox gifts with excitement. Since 1993, Operation Christmas Child has delivered over 232 million shoeboxes in more than 170 countries and territories. Featured image courtesy of Samaritan’s Purse.
Story by Harry Crowther
The little boy’s name was Happy. But when Robin Pate first saw him, Happy didn’t seem happy.
Pate is a year-round volunteer for Operation Christmas Child (OCC), a Christian mission delivering shoeboxes to children in need around the world. A few years ago, she travelled to Malawi, Africa, with OCC for a life-changing experience filled with joy and tears.
Before meeting Happy, Pate cried the whole day she arrived in Malawi. She remembers riding on a bus, heartbroken at what she was seeing out the window. According to Global Finance Magazine, Malawi is the sixth-poorest country in the world.
“These people had nothing,” Pate said.
Pate and her group arrived at a church with shoebox gift packages for children. She said that if the children had toys, they were things made from garbage. In many cases, the kids wore clothes that had more holes than material. Pate noticed that Happy’s clothes were about the same age as her. “I’m not young,” she said.
With Happy sitting in front of her and a shoebox in her hands, Pate bowed her head to pray. She needed this to be a good box. She wanted Happy to return to the church and find Jesus.
“In that moment,” Pate said, “God displayed this movie in my mind of children of different colors and different ages from different countries speaking different languages of different abilities. And it was like, ‘Lord, they all need a shoebox. They all need a good, well-packed shoebox.’”
Happy was reluctant to open his box. He didn’t think it was his to have. He didn’t speak English, but Pate was able to convince him to open it. She was tearing up as he did.
When he saw a soccer ball and other items inside, Happy grinned ear to ear. What was missing just a few moments earlier. Pure joy.
Stories like Happy’s are what define the purpose of Operation Christmas Child. Many children on this planet have never received a gift. The red-and-green OCC shoebox is their first. Someone from a different part of the world, miles and miles away, had it in their heart to send a child they do not know a personal gift.
A project within Christian organization Samaritan’s Purse, OCC’s mission is to demonstrate God’s love in a tangible way to children in need. With an army of over 519,000 volunteers and a vast network of churches, it collects shoeboxes filled with toys, school supplies and hygiene items and delivers them around the world.
OCC is the largest Christmas project of its kind, with partners across four continents collecting shoeboxes. The project has delivered more than 232 million shoeboxes in more than 170 countries and territories. OCC hopes to reach another 12 million children in 2025.
Beyond just the gift, OCC provides recipients the opportunity to learn about Jesus. Since 2009, over 46 million shoebox recipients have participated in OCC’s 12-lesson discipleship program, The Greatest Journey.
“Each year-round volunteer, participating church, group, and individual shoebox packer is the heart and soul and engine driving Operation Christmas Child,” OCC Senior Director Randy Riddle said on the project’s website. “Together, we are rallying around the opportunity and calling to serve Jesus in this way — with urgency to introduce more and more children to a loving God through His son, Jesus Christ.”
OCC started in 1993. Months before Christmas, a man in England called Samaritan’s Purse President Franklin Graham and asked if he would pack shoeboxes with gifts for children in Eastern Europe. Graham said yes but forgot about his promise until he received a call back asking about the gifts around Thanksgiving.
Graham asked a pastor friend, Ross Rhoads of Calvary Church in Charlotte, if he could help with the effort. Rhoads showed his congregation how to fill boxes with simple gifts and encouraged them to write a personalized letter to the child. It didn’t take long for the large church to amass 11,000 shoeboxes. Additional gifts were collected in Canada, and Samaritan’s Purse sent 28,000 shoeboxes to children in the Balkans that Christmas.
Since that first year, OCC has grown exponentially.
“This feels like a true partnership with Him,” said Dawn Lyons, OCC’s international regional manager for Central Africa. “I feel like the Lord has breathed on the vision that Franklin had. If you look at the UN or you look at the Red Cross, these manmade organizations that put projects together and go, they’re not having the impact that we’re having. And I feel like it’s this co-creation with the Lord.”
The impact starts with outreach events and packing parties. Pate is the area coordinator for lower Wake County in North Carolina. In early November ahead of shoebox collection season, Pate joined lower Wake County Community Relations Coordinator Christy Kendrick for a pop-up event in Wendell, N.C. They raised awareness about OCC and handed out resources to those interested in packing. Pate and Kendrick are part of one of many volunteer teams like it.
Kendrick has been packing shoeboxes since she was little. She got involved as a volunteer at her church’s drop-off location. This year is her first in her current role as a year-round volunteer. She said the experience has given her even more than she could have imagined.
“These children haven’t even heard about Jesus,” Kendrick said. “So they don’t even have hope for their situation. We are sending them these boxes and telling them about Jesus and giving them something that they would probably not get any other way.
“And that is entirely life-transforming.”
Kendrick’s job is to reach out to people and groups in the community, including businesses, senior centers and schools. She encourages them to pack shoeboxes and helps organize packing parties.
In early November, Kendrick organized a packing party at Christian Montessori school Oak City Academy in Garner. As they were packing, the students prayed over every item and every box. They formed an assembly line to the back of Kendrick’s truck. They passed each box down the line, every child saying one more prayer over every box.
“That was one of the best experiences I’ve had this year,” Kendrick said.
The next step after packing in the journey of a shoebox is collection. OCC collects boxes at more than 4,700 drop-off locations in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. National Collection Week is the third week in November each year.
From the drop-off locations, the shoeboxes are then sent to one of eight major processing centers across the U.S. Two of these are in North Carolina, one in Charlotte and one in Boone, where Samaritan’s Purse is headquartered. Volunteer teams at the centers are trained to inspect the boxes. They make sure nothing is in the boxes that would harm the child or prevent it from passing customs. They also fill up under-packed boxes with extra gifts.
The boxes are sorted by age and gender and then packed in cartons to be shipped overseas.
Distribution of shoeboxes falls to Samaritan’s Purse employees like Lyons, who works on initiatives in Africa to grow shoebox numbers and The Greatest Journey. She creates and coaches regional teams that deliver boxes and introduce children to the discipleship program.
“The goal is ultimately evangelism, discipleship, multiplication,” Lyons said. “What that means is for every child that receives a shoebox, we aim that 60 to 70 percent — that’s where we’re at right now, we’d love that number to be more — of those children go through discipleship with The Greatest Journey.”
Part of Lyons’ job is to go on distribution trips to countries in Africa. She said the work is very rewarding but also extremely challenging. The logistics of importing the boxes into Africa are difficult. Some countries OCC works in have different worldviews and aren’t open to the gospel. And for Lyons personally, she is a female leader working in places with male-dominated governments and cultures.
Lyons said her motivation comes from God’s kindness and the divine intervention she sees in the project. The reward is precious moments like the one she experienced this past March in Congo.
As part of an initiative to extend OCC’s reach, Lyons brought shoeboxes to a school for deaf and blind. She said these children are orphans and treated like they are on the outskirts of society.
The classroom was silent. Lyons watched as a teacher used a larger flipbook and sign language to deliver the message to the children about Jesus. When the teacher flipped to the page of Jesus rising from the dead, all of the children jumped to their feet out of excitement and joy.
“Every child in the room loses it, and they’re going crazy,” Lyons said. “They’re so excited. They had no idea that we had shoeboxes for them. They were just that excited to see an image of Jesus rising from the dead. And it was incredible. I think about that all the time.”
Four years ago, Dorothy Addo-Mensah’s daughters Charissa and Chiara received shoeboxes in Ghana from their Sunday school teacher through OCC. Dorothy said that children in Ghana don’t typically receive gifts for Christmas. They would maybe get a dress or shoes to wear to Christmas service.
“We got presents for Christmas,” said Charisa, who was 6 years old at the time. “We were really happy when we got them because we don’t really get presents like that.”
Dororthy remembers seeing the joy on her daughters’ faces when they opened the boxes. It was a special moment they all cherish. A tangible representation of faith and love.
“The love of Jesus is even spread across by people contributing money and buying things for them,” Dorothy said. “And knowing that people all over the world care about them and want them to know about Jesus Christ.”
Dorothy left her family and came to the U.S. in 2022 to pursue a Ph.D. in nursing at UNC-Chapel Hill. Prior to that, she worked in Ghana as a nursing educator and clinical coordinator. In July of 2024, Dorothy’s daughters joined her in the U.S..
Dorothy, Charisa and Chiara came full circle with OCC this past November. Years after receiving boxes, they joined in a packing party at Chapel Hill Bible Church to give what was given to them.
Dorothy was amazed at the excitement from all the adults and children involved. Everyone was writing notes to go in the boxes and praying over them. It was a room full of love.
“I was just enthused that people could contribute from different sources and buy stuff and send it all the way to Africa,” Dorothy said. “Sometimes we just receive the things, but we don’t know the effort that is put in. And getting to hear that after the things are collected in this center they are shipped to another center and then distributed. It’s a whole chain.
“I’m so humbled. I’m grateful.”
One simple shoebox, with one heartfelt message of faith and love, can have profound and transcendent impacts — on both the receiver and the giver.
“Most of the kids that we work with have never received a single gift before in their lives,” Lyons said. “It’s pretty phenomenal to be able to hand a child a gift and to know that, not only are they about to open up a shoebox that will change their lives, but inside of the shoebox and the discipleship program that’s going on, they’re going to hear about Jesus. It’s truly remarkable that we actually get to do that as a job.”
