I feel like the email came early this year! Sometimes it’s well after Christmas before I find out. But this time I knew a week before Christmas!
Thanks to the Follow Your Box online donation option, you can find out where your gifts ended up.
Ours was very interesting this year! Bug and I forgot how many boxes we did. I think the final total was 13 (it could have been 15 . We took two boxes to our church for their collection. Then we took 6 to the relay (drop-off) center in our area where we volunteer every year. Then later during collection week we took a few more (neither one of us remembers how many) to the relay center again.
If you’re not familiar with the process, if you turn in a box to a church/group/etc, they take it to their nearest relay center. At the relay center the shoeboxes are packed into shipping cartons and the relay center delivers them to the trucks that take them to one of the processing centers around the country. From the processing centers they are set on their way to their final location.
All the shoeboxes in our area go through Atlanta, Georgia, for processing. But our two boxes that we turned in at church went to a different relay center than the one we volunteer at. And since we turned in boxes on two different days at the relay center I knew they would be in different shipping cartons.
We wanted to see how many different locations we could get our boxes too if we spread them out.
photo credit: ontheworldmap.com
It ended up being 3. So our plan worked. Our countries were:
- South Africa
- Central African Republic
- Chad
Adding in the countries from previous years, Botswana, Uganda, Madagascar, Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Gabon – and we’re quickly filling up a map of Africa!
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