I have to admit, seeing as it’s already collection week, writing this article kind of made me feel like the person who starts making clucking noises just as you’re about to bite into your delicious fried chicken leg. If you already made a shoebox, please ignore me. If you are eating chicken, enjoy. Merry Christmas to all.
Anyway, a friend recently asked me to look into the ethics of Christmas shoeboxes, which is why I’m writing this. If you don’t know what a Christmas shoebox is, get outta heeeahh. Just kidding. I will fill you in (a full paragraph past the introduction- how rude). Christmas shoeboxes belong to a Samaritan’s Purse initiative called “Operation Christmas Child” and they are rather popular among evangelical Christians. By that, I mean it is not unheard of for a parishioner to actually squeal with glee in the sanctuary upon glimpsing that the box templates have arrived. Anyway. Every fall, millions of flat cardboard thingies are distributed to participating Canadian churches across Canada, the United States and other developed nations throughout the world. They look kind of like this:
I was going to colour it red and green but my stupid laptop, with its recently replaced hardrive, was going to make me pay for a paint app download. The nerve! I’m grumpy.
To the spatially and/or mathematically challenged (aka me), they initially resemble something like a one-dimensional, festive, portly robot. Then you fold them up and the magic of Christmas happens. They become THIS:
Once they have been folded up to assume their rightful forms, folks participating take them home and fill the shoeboxes with various store-bought items such as toothpaste, soap, toys and school supplies. The boxes are then collected and sent overseas to children in developing countries as a Christmas gift.
These boxes have nostalgic significance for me, as I’m sure they do for many other evangelical families. I recall many a 1990s November afternoon spent at the dollar store, poking around for interesting items to put inside (we will use the term ‘interesting’ rather liberally in this case… I still feel sorry for the kids that got my gifts, being that they had been assembled by a small, bespectacled bookworm who thought that HB pencils and Hilroy notebooks were too cool even for school). As I walked my shoebox up to the collection point in the foyer every year, I enjoyed a sense that I was taking part in something special. But is the warm little buzz we get from participating in this initiative year after year enough to justify its continued existence? I’m not sure anymore.
As an adult, this whole shoebox thing has begun to tickle my brains a little. I did quite a bit of research this week on the subject and I have my own opinions, but rather than dictate what I think other people should do, I thought I would frame this article around some questions.
Does Operation Christmas Child Reflect The Values I Believe In?
By its own estimate, Samaritan’s purse has distributed over 100 million shoeboxes since its inception. In my experience, these shoeboxes tend to be filled with mass-produced items, primarily purchased from the dollar store or large chains such as Wal-Mart and Superstore. That is a heck of a lot of cheap product! Besides the obvious question of labour standards and undercutting local artisans, other consumption issues abound. Gifts eventually wear out– especially consumables like soap and toothpaste. Beyond that, it takes a lot of volunteer time and energy, not to mention carbon emissions, to manufacture that much cardboard, inspect the contents of that many packages and ship that many boxes overseas. Samaritan’s Purse has a variety of initiatives on the go, and many of them are considerably more sustainable, such as their clean water project. What kind of real, lasting changes could we effect if all of us were to redirect the money we were going to spend on a shoebox?
Does It Align With Foreign Aid Best Practices?
I’m pretty sure nobody asked for these boxes, and that may be reason enough not to give them. Operation Christmas Child has been around since 1990 and its strategic model has remained basically static. Meanwhile, aid theory has evolved a lot over the last several decades and many aid organizations today are recognizing that it is the local community- not NGOs- who should be identifying the issues and coming up with the solutions, and the role of the ‘aid’ organization should simply be to help localities carry out those solutions in the form of consultation, financial support, infrastructure support, and so on. It seems problematic for a North American organization to simply decide that a shoebox full of soap, toothpaste and toys is the best way to assist a child in poverty, and then enlist the privileged people of the world to purchase all the product and ship it off.
Is It Culturally Appropriate?
According to its website, last year Samaritan’s Purse distributed shoeboxes (among other countries) to Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, Iraq and Senegal– all majority-Muslim countries. How is a box labeled ‘Christmas Child’ likely to be received in those regions? I’m not really sure. It is noteworthy that in the NGO world, Samaritan’s Purse is considered a proselytizing organization. In fact, the shoeboxes themselves are often accompanied with religious literature. This may or may not be problematic for you, depending on your own personal beliefs.
A Final Question
My favourite cultural critic and all-around weirdo, Slavoj Zizek, makes an interesting argument about TOMS shoes. We’ll get to that and what it has to do with shoeboxes,* but first, let’s get you picturing this raving Marxist lunatic properly.
wait for it…
There it is.
one more, okay? don’t be scared.
Okay. Zizek asserts that the product’s “One for One” model presents consumers with a false ‘absolution’ for the ‘sin’ of excess. When we buy them, we relieve ourselves of our consumer guilt for a time by having ‘helped someone in need’ and feel free to continue living an excessive lifestyle. We may also feel excused from the harder task of participating in more unwieldy grassroots initiatives that would serve to truly counteract global inequality. I wonder– can a parallel be drawn here? Do I fill a shoebox because I truly believe it will translate into lasting social justice, or is it just something nice to do with my family during the holiday season?
Cluck, cluck, cluck…
Just kidding. Please still be my friend.
* other than the fact that they are shoes and therefore belong in shoeboxes.
Links:
http://www.samaritanspurse.ca/media/342589/Fact-Sheet-2015.pdf
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2002/dec/18/guardiansocietysupplement7
Resources:
Corbett, Steve. When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor… and Yourself. Moody, 2014. http://www.amazon.ca/When-Helping-Hurts-Alleviate-Yourself/dp/0802409989
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