A spring bottle drive is coming up to help children in poor countries around the world at Christmas.
Operation Christmas Child is holding their annual Spring Bottle Drive on Saturday, April 6, from 9– 2:30 p.m. at Ridge Church, at the corner of Lougheed Highway and 222 Street.
Funds from the bottle drive will be used to purchase supplies when they are on sale to pack into shoe boxes. Items include stuffed animals, special toys, hygiene, and school supplies.
Every year people from across the country pack shoe boxes for the Samaritan’s Purse Christmas campaign.
Last year people throughout Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows managed to pack 5,302 shoe boxes which were sent to countries like Ukraine, Philippines, West Africa, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua.
“In many cases, the shoe box gift is the only gift a child will ever receive,” said local organizer Barb Gustafson.
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One box, one child, one lifetime, is the general rule in distributing shoe boxes in the more than 100 countries that the group distributes in, added Gustafson.
The annual bottle drive is really important to the local campaign, Gustafson noted.
“We depend a lot on the bottle drive to have that extra income to buy things for the boxes,” she said. “And we make that dollar stretch a long way.”
More bottle drives are also being planned including: one in the summer on Saturday, June 8, and in the fall on Saturday, Sept. 7, both during the same times and at the same location.
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Samaritan’s Purse Canada is an international relief, nondenominational evangelical Christian organization whose mission is to provide spiritual and physical aid to people around the world. They have been doing relief and development work since 1973.
Since that time the annual Operation Christmas Child campaign has distributed more than 198 million shoe boxes.
For more information go to: samaritanspurse.ca.
