Operation Christmas Child

In a recent profile, we wrote about the medics from Peterborough EMS in Ontario, Canada, who raise a large garden and give away food to the local food shelf and needy families in the area (How Does Your EMS Garden Grow?). The garden is dormant for now, and the medics have moved on to a new charity: Operation Christmas Child. For weeks, schoolchildren, families, community groups and EMS providers in Peterborough have been filling shoeboxes with toys, hygiene items, school supplies and more to be shipped to kids in needy countries all over the world.

Operation Christmas Child is an offshoot of Samaritan's Purse, a Christian-based organization with international headquarters in Boone, North Carolina. OCC was started about 16 years ago, and Peterborough EMS became involved 6 years ago, explains Samantha Cameron, program organizer for the province of Ontario. "We were helping at the local collection center, which is where people would bring their filled boxes to be shipped on, and my husband and I thought it would be fun if the boxes had a little something extra special," she says. "Last year and this year, the paramedic union donated money to buy supplies for the shoeboxes, then had a shoebox-stuffing party where they invited a local kids' agency and the kids' parents or guardians to help fill the boxes. Each year, between 90 and 100 boxes were created out of that party. Last year, the SARTECH medics from the Canadian Forces Base Trenton 424 squadron came on board, and it became an EMS-sponsored event to bring more awareness and publicity to the program. The squad brought in its helicopter to one local school and also to EMS headquarters, and they put a few boxes on the helicopter to show children how the boxes would be delivered to remote villages."

In addition to buying supplies and stuffing boxes, several Peterborough medics have volunteered their time to drive around to local schools and pick up boxes that had been filled by school children and their families. One school filled 180 boxes, says Cameron.

Once they're filled, the boxes from eastern Canada are sent to Kitchener, Ontario; the boxes from western Canada go to Calgary, the Canadian headquarters for Samaritan's Purse. And where do the boxes collected in Peterborough go? "This year, they were going to Haiti, Argentina, the Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, Nicaragua, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Uruguay," says Cameron. "The boxes from western Canada might go to places like Bolivia, Chile, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Paraguay and Venezuela. From the program in the United Kingdom, they could go to Cambodia, Vietnam and Mongolia. It's a massive organizational effort."

The organizers of Operation Christmas Child make it a year-round effort to partner with local communities and bring on new places, says Cameron. "One of our neighboring services--Northumberland County EMS--joined us this year, and a number of other services have expressed an interest in being involved next year. I think it's really exciting that these men and women who spend their working hours helping people are willing to do this in their volunteer time as well."

For more information on Samaritan's Purse and/or Operation Christmas Child, visit www.samaritanspurse.org.