Cute Girl with Gift

Well, we did it. And I’m exhausted.

I know that I didn’t carry everyone of those gifts, but after a month of traveling around Burkina with the local OCC team, my body was telling me differently. I was beat.

We traveled to 3 different regions: (Keep Reading!)
Read more…

Here are a few pictures from the OCC distributions in 2009. Those boxes each had about 15 gifts in them - they were HEAVY!!

The kids would line up and receive a booklet that talks about “the greatest Gift of all”. Then we would sing a song together as they wave their booklets.

Can you see the joy on their faces? The shoebox gifts really are full of great stuff!

There are a couple of pictures of the nighttime evangelism. Crowds ranged from 200 to over 1000. We did puppets, skits and a film. Joseph Dayamba would then preach the Gospel. Powerful!

Operation Christmas Child (a division of Samaritan’s Purse, founded by Franklin Graham) is a ministry operating in over one hundred countries in the world. They distribute gifts donated by families, wrapped in shoebox-sized boxes (it is sometimes called Operation Shoebox). The gifts are packaged and then shipped to needy children. Many families contribute $7 with their gifts, enabling Operation Christmas Child to pay for the shipping of the containers full of gifts, as well as all the taxes and fees.

Within the country, Operation Christmas Child relies on local pastors to oversee the actual distribution. Samaritan’s Purse pays for all the shipping and fees to get the containers to the border of the country. This means that the expenses from the border on need to be shouldered by the local team.  This equates to $4000 per container, or $.60 per gift. It would be complicated to explain exactly how they get the money, but suffice to say that it is quite a burden.

We met Pastor Joseph Koomson (a Ghanaian living in Burkina) about 3 months ago.  He has been heading up OCC (Operation Christmas Child) in Burkina since 1997.  We all immediately recognized the potential for a partnership - they handle the distribution, Joseph Dayamba and I head up the evangelism and follow-up.

So that is how we decided to follow OCC around this year as they distributed all 10 containers - 67,000 gifts!!!