By Janice McIntyre
City Editor
She cried as she begged her mother not to make her go to school that day. It was a cold, winter day, with several inches of snow on the ground – and she had no shoes.
For months she had been wearing a ragged pair of shoes that her older brother had outgrown, and her toes were protruding from gaping holes. In an effort to keep the young girl’s feet from freezing, her parents had wrapped plastic bags around her socks for insulation and then covered the bags with another pair of socks. They then fastened the torn ends of each shoe with steel wire and sent her to school. She cried all the way to school.
At the age of 11 – young Lejla was a child whose life had been filled with love and laughter – until in the early 1990s, when gunfire and land mines suddenly changed her young life in war-torn Bosnia.
As she trudged through the snow with tears blinding her vision, Lejla said she wondered if God even cared about how her life had changed and her childhood had been stolen. Many nights the family went to bed hungry.
When she finally arrived at school that day, a man was handing out brightly colored boxes to her classmates. She never knew how much that shoebox would change her life.
“I thought I was dreaming when I opened the box. Inside was candy – the first I had tasted in four years – and pens and pencils and a notebook for school. But best of all – there was a brand new pair of white sneakers,” she said. Lejla was the only one in the class who had received a pair of shoes and “they fit perfectly,” she said.
Lejla was one of the first children to ever receive an Operation Christmas Child shoebox filled with gifts, when the program started in 1993. OCC is an initiative of Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian relief organization lead by Franklin Graham, son of the world renown evangelist, Billy Graham. OCC’s main goal is to teach children about the love of Jesus Christ and to let them know that there are people in the world who love and care about them. “Every shoebox offers an opportunity to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with a hurting child,” Graham said. In 2013, OCC celebrated over 100 million shoeboxes delivered to children throughout the world.
Lejla said she was so overwhelmed when she saw those brand new shoes, “I started to cry. I felt truly blessed.” For the first time in many years, she was crying tears of joy. “I knew that God had answered my prayers. I knew that God – the real God – was watching over me.”
In 2000, Lejla married an American, and it was at that time that, after hearing someone talk about the OCC relief organization, that she realized that is where her box filled with those shoes had come from – OCC volunteers who traveled to Bosnia to deliver those gifts. She has been a spokeswoman for OCC for many years.
And then there was the shoebox that was packed with a CD player with batteries and several CDs – nothing else. Some volunteers were worried because those were the only items packed inside the box – even though it was filled to the brim. Their concern turned to joy when the child opened the box and feeling of the contents – the face of the only blind child in the room lit up with a huge smile.
For the past two years, members of the South Arkansas OCC team, have collected, packed and shipped more than 50,000 shoeboxes both years for needy children throughout the year, according to Vicki Pepper, coordinator of the South Arkansas team.
This year’s collection week will be Nov. 16-23, when a number of large tractor-trailer rigs will arrive at Immanuel Baptist Church in El Dorado and volunteers – who have spent the year gathering items to fill shoeboxes – will then begin packing the OCC crates into the trucks for trips to harbor cities, where they will be loaded onto boats for shipment to more than 100 countries throughout the world. They will be delivered to children – many who have never received a gift in their lives – and who suffer from war, natural disasters, famine, exploitation, diseases and a number of other predicaments a child should never have to endure.
Shoeboxes filled with gifts are delivered by boat, airplane, helicopter, cars, trucks, ox carts, on the backs of elephants, camels, horses, mules, dog sleds, rickshaws, bicycles, motorcycles and on foot. Shoeboxes have been delivered to thousands of children in Haiti where an earthquake devastated many homes and families; to snowbound villages in Far East Russia; towns in Uganda where the AIDS epidemic has left thousands of children without parents and in war zones throughout the world.
Local church members, businesses, civic clubs, school groups and individuals help pack shoe boxes every year to send to children throughout the world through OCC. For more information about how to pack a shoebox for a hurting child, call Immanuel Baptist Church at 862-4264 or visit www.samaritanspurse.org/occ.