Where the shoeboxes go

The annual shoebox appeal remains popular in Irish schools despite concerns about its evangelical aims. What is not in doubt, though, is the joy of the children receiving the gift boxes, writes KITTY HOLLANDin Timisoara, Romania

TO SOME minds charming, to others inappropriate, the annual shoebox appeal has become something of a staple in the Christmas countdown for more than 3,000 mainly national schools. Thousands of parents over the past two months have bought small gifts, packed them into shoeboxes wrapped in bright paper and sent them off with their children to school, to be sent to children abroad by the Irish charity Team Hope.

This Christmas, Team Hope will send 172,383 boxes to Romania, eastern Croatia, Moldova, Ukraine and Armenia and, in Africa, to Burundi, Rwanda, Congo, Lesotho and Swaziland.

A registered charity, the organisation is avowedly Christian. Working out of an office in Leopardstown, Co Dublin, it sends volunteers into about 2,000 schools across the State in September and October, outlining its mission and distributing leaflets that invite children and parents to “light up a child’s life with a little of God’s love for them shown through a shoebox!”

Suggestions are given as to what to include in the box. Parents are asked to donate €3 for its storage and transportation, and to leave it unsealed. The boxes are collected and brought to centres to be “checked and sealed”. They must be left unsealed, according to the Team Hope chief executive, Niall Barry, as some shoeboxes are donated with unsuitable items, such as half-eaten sweets or limbless Barbies. “Some are a bit light as well, so we make sure they are all full before we seal them,” he says.

The leaflet says: “If a local leader requests it, as an optional extra, we also give a Christmas card explaining where their box came from, about Ireland and the significance of the Christmas message.”

Until last year Team Hope was called Samaritan’s Purse Ireland, which ran the shoebox appeal for 11 years under the moniker Operation Christmas Child. Team Hope insists it has now broken all links with its former parent organisation Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical American group.

In October 2009 an article by Wicklow teacher Katherine Quirke in In Touch, the magazine of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO), was critical of the American Samaritan’s Purse, pointing out that its president, Franklin Graham, was a member of the US Southern Baptist Church and son of the evangelical preacher Billy Graham. The US charity states that “evangelism is at the heart of everything we do” and has called the shoeboxes it delivers “tools of evangelism”. Franklin Graham, who has been criticised for his anti-Islamic views, was listed until last year as a director of Samaritan’s Purse Ireland.

The main purpose of Quirke’s article, she wrote, was to “provide information on the way in which Operation Christmas Child links evangelism of children and distribution of aid”.

“We got a lot of calls from teachers and principals after the article. I think a good number of schools reviewed their support for it,” INTO spokesman Peter Mullan said last week.

“I felt, and still do, that religion and aid should be entirely separate,” Quirke said last week. “The more we looked into Samaritan’s Purse, the more the staff here wanted nothing to do with it. It’s fine if the motivation for helping is religious, but it’s wrong to make evangelism a condition of the aid.

“The shoebox appeal is tempting. There’s a feel-good factor for the children in wrapping up a box and putting trinkets in it. But if they are really interested in the welfare of the people in these countries, wouldn’t the most efficient way be to send money and buy toys locally?”

Team Hope’s 2010 accounts give as the company name “Team Hope Ltd (formerly Samaritan’s Purse Ireland Ltd)” and state that “Franklin Graham resigned as director of the company on 31 July 2010”.

Team Hope is not a signatory of the code of conduct of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, which sets standards for international aid agencies. The code states that “aid will not be used to further a particular political or religious standpoint”. Trócaire, Goal and ChildFund Ireland are among the Irish signatories.

Though he makes no secret of the group’s Christian ethos, Niall Barry says evangelism is not what Team Hope is about. The 2009 controversy, he says, brought the problems he and his board were having with the direction of Samaritan’s Purse “to a head”.

“We too were unhappy with the way Samaritan’s Purse wanted things done. Evangelism was becoming more central to their whole purpose and we just didn’t want to go with that,” he says. The Irish Times contacted Samaritans Purse in the US, seeking their view on the split with the Irish body. The American group released this statement: “For 40 years, Samaritan’s Purse has ministered in Jesus’ name to victims of violence, war, oppression, poverty and natural disasters. We haven’t changed and will continue to do the same for the next 40 years and beyond. We believe that Jesus died for our sins, was buried and that he rose to life and he that he will come into the heart of anyone that calls upon his name.”

FORTY THOUSAND BOXES WILL BE distributed in western Romania by Team Hope this year, taken by truck from Ireland. On a distribution trip to Timisoara last week were eight volunteers. For most, fervent Christianity appeared to be at the heart of their personal purpose. Grace was said before every meal and pastor Brian Synnott, from Bandon, Co Cork, gave his thoughts for the day after breakfast.

Distribution was co-ordinated locally by two local Christian charities, Ecce Homo and Cris-Du Areopagus. Both run outreach and social programmes for the poor in a country with a poverty rate of 20.5 per cent among households with children. The average monthly wage is €150.

Remus Runcan, a Baptist pastor, gives talks to the children before the shoeboxes are distributed. Prayers are said at all group distributions and Christmas carols sung. At an orphanage in Recas, about 15 miles outside Timisoara, about 100 children aged between two and 14 wait for more than an hour in the small Orthodox church before the team arrives with the boxes. They sit on the floor and on benches, two-year-olds on the laps of four-year-olds, older ones towards the back, all excited about the strange visitors and fuss.

“In November and December the children in Ireland pack up these shoeboxes with gifts,” says Runcan. “They are packed with love from Ireland, because you are all loved. And the greatest gift we have at Christmas is Jesus Christ, who was sent to us by God.”

Tape around the boxes is cut before distribution by the Irish visitors. The children are told to wait until the pastor has counted down from 10, then lids are torn and gently removed, to many oohs and aahs. The children seem delighted. Each box is full to the top with items such as pens, crayons, toy cars, dolls, CDs, mirrors, jumpers, slippers, soap, and toothpaste. None contains religious literature.

Christmas cards are then given out, though how many are read is questionable. The message inside gives information about Ireland and tells how “Jesus, the greatest gift you could receive at Christmas time, is forever”.

In a 98-per-cent Christian country, albeit with no state religion, such services are unlikely to be contentious. Dana Androic, a childcare worker at the orphanage, tells how one of her charges, three-year-old Andrei, who holds his gold-wrapped box close to his chest, was abandoned with his three brothers. Asked if they would get any other Christmas gifts, she says: “This is about it. They have been waiting for this for weeks. They have been so excited.”

All of these Timisoara children who got a shoebox are in genuine, often dire need. We meet one family whose eight children sleep two to a bed in one room while their parents sleep on a pull-out in the kitchen. In a freezing one-room apartment, a mother with six children has been given one week’s notice to leave, as the landlord has sold up. In rural villages we see children without shoes, in December.

Valerie Moran, a teacher at St Nessan’s National School in Mungret, Co Limerick, says staff weighed up the pros and cons of the shoebox appeal during the 2009 controversy. “It did come up in the staffroom, but we decided in the end the bottom line was that this is a gift from one child to another. It’s good for the Irish children too, to think about how difficult life is in other parts of the world.”