Tuesday was the first day of processing in both Boone and Charlotte, and it was an overwhelming success! Arriving at the Charlotte Processing Center around 8 a.m., I found the staff encouraged and excited for the volunteers to arrive. In the back of the warehouse was one of the biggest mountains of shoe boxes I have ever seen! The evening shift had unloaded trucks carrying boxes from all over the East Coast. After a brief warehouse walkthrough to make sure everything was in place, the doors opened and a flood of eager volunteers came rolling in.

All shoe box processors must go through a brief training where they are taught to look for “inappropriate” items in each box, including liquids, perishable foods, chocolate, dangerous items, and breakables. After the training, each volunteer is assigned to a specific job. “Inspectors” look for items that need to be taken out; “tapers” tape the boxes shut; “inappropriate item workers” sort the items taken out of boxes; and “lifters” pick up full cartons of shoe boxes in preparation for loading into sea containers. (Shipping by boat is the most popular method we use.) The Charlotte warehouse usually ships about 20 sea containers daily. Most volunteers work about four hours, so by the end of their shift, they are usually tired and have earned the Operation Christmas Child T-shirt they get to take home.

At 5 p.m., I left Charlotte and made the two-hour drive “up the mountain” to Boone, NC to help the staff shut down for the evening. When I walked into the Processing Center, people were busily working everywhere. After a couple of hours talking to the staff and answering questions, it was time to see how many shoe boxes had been processed. After doing some quick calculations, the numbers were in: Boone had processed 25,266 shoe boxes, and Charlotte had packaged 87,722 shoe boxes! Not a bad start to an exciting season!