Locals contribute in a big way to Operation Christmas Child

When Emmy Silverman visited the Philippines last year, she went to some locations that had never been visited by foreigners before to deliver some of the 6,000 boxes filled with goodies donated to Filipino children in need.

Unlike in Cebu City, the children in the far-flung locations on the island of Bohol greeted their visitors in a reserved fashion. But it was also in these places where the items inside gift-wrapped shoe boxes were treasured in a way few Americans may comprehend.

“For them, it’s so precious,” said Silverman, greater Los Angeles area coordinator for Operation Christmas Child, an annual project of the evangelical Christian nonprofit Samaritan’s Purse.

This week, after collecting donations in Burbank, Glendale, La Crescenta and throughout the Los Angeles area, volunteers packed up a new batch of shoe boxes for the project to send to deserving children in more than 150 countries.

The group had a goal of collecting about 12,000 donation-stuffed shoe boxes in the greater Los Angeles area, with 7,750 of those from Burbank, Glendale and La Crescenta.

“We’re still counting,” Silverman said Monday, but about 600 shoe boxes were packed on Saturday in the parking lot behind the Eagle Rock Baptist Church in Los Angeles. Then, on Monday afternoon, two semi-trailers in the lot were filled with nearly 700 cases, each holding several shoe boxes.

Franklin Graham, eldest son of Billy and Ruth Bell Graham, is president and chief executive of Samaritan’s Purse, which distributed nearly 10 million shoe boxes in 2013, according to tax filings. The charity’s overall goal this year is to reach 11 million children in need worldwide.

Helping to box up donations in Eagle Rock was Martha Zakaria, a Los Angeles resident and native of Cuba who said she remembers how meaningful it was to get gifts from the United States after Fidel Castro led a revolution in that country in the late 1950s. She said the boxes are a sign of God’s love — each one comes with a prayer.

“We want to make a special day for the children, where they feel loved,” Zakaria said.

The goodies aren’t just candies and toys, but socks and shoes, clothing and hygiene items — items that are luxuries when you have no money, she said.

Some popular gift items that Americans may take for granted are pencils and paper. Many children even carefully fold the wrapping paper to keep it, sometimes cutting out the designs to use as stickers, Silverman said.

They are items that won’t just help the children, but will benefit their whole family, said Belen McDaniel. For example, reusable plastic shoe boxes that are sometimes donated can be used to carry water.

McDaniel said she volunteered with her four children as a way to teach the kind of values she and her husband preach, because “it’s important not just through words, but through our example.”

She added that because it’s an inter-denominational project, she can recruit friends and family from other churches, too.

Many of the children who benefit from the shoe boxes have never had anything of their own, Silverman said. Then volunteers bring in the donated goods, sometimes by foot or whatever the local transportation methods are — “elephant if they have elephants,” she said. Each child then has their own toothbrush, wash cloth or teddy bear.

Last year, one Filipino boy waited eagerly for his name to be called when boxes were being distributed in his village, Silverman said. However, for some reason he had been left off the organization’s list — someone may not have checked it twice.

When all the names had been read, he was the only one not to have gotten a shoe box and he was on the brink of tears. Thankfully, she said, there was one extra box and when he got it, he held it tight.

“Even one shoe box has impact,” Silverman said.

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Chad Garland, chad.garland@latimes.com

Twitter: @chadgarland