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Bob Cowgill, Operation Christmas Child network coordinator for the Elkins team, gives shoebox gifts to children in Panama in 2010.
Editor's note: This article is part of a weekly series that highlights volunteers in the region who help local organizations, churches and nonprofit agencies. To make a suggestion, please call The Inter-Mountain's newsroom at 304-636-2124.
ELKINS -- For more than two decades, an area volunteer has devoted his life to helping children.
Bob Cowgill has served as network coordinator for the Elkins team of Operation Christmas Child for the past 21 years.
The Elkins team of Operation Christmas Child covers six counties -- Randolph, Pocahontas, Webster, Upshur, Tucker and Barbour -- and is a project of Samaritan's Purse, an international Christian relief organization led by Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelist Billy Graham.
Cowgill serves as the network coordinator, overseeing different drop-off locations throughout the region.
"We have drop-offs in six different counties, and each county has a team leader. I am the coordinator for those drop-offs," he said in a recent interview.
"One of the things I really enjoy doing is presentations. I go to churches and organizations that want a speaker, and I also do a lot of fairs, festivals and expos," he continued. "I have a table set up with handouts to help promote Operation Christmas Child."
Cowgill said he became inspired to volunteer for Operation Christmas Child 21 years ago after learning of Mary Damron, a woman who collected more than 1,000 boxes and personally took them to Operation Christmas Child headquarters in North Carolina.
"I saw a story in The Charleston Gazette about a woman named Mary Damron down in southern West Virginia. She had seen Franklin Graham giving shoebox gifts to a boy in a hospital bed in Bosnia while the war was going on," he explained. "She thought 'Well, that is something I can do,' so she went around her area down in Wyoming County and gathered up 1,200 shoebox gifts, borrowed a truck -- her son drove the truck -- and took them to Boone, North Carolina, where the Operation Christmas Child headquarters is and met Franklin Graham that day. He invited her to go to Bosnia and, from there, she became spokesperson for Operation Christmas Child.
"That story really was interesting to me, so I called her and she told me they didn't have an organized effort here in the Elkins area. So she asked me if I could get something started, and that's how I got started," he continued. "We started out the first year with about 1,200 shoeboxes, and this past year we had almost 12,000."
He said working with children has always been important to him, and added he even traveled to Panama to hand out the gift boxes to kids.
"I like kids and I have always liked projects involving children," Cowgill said. "I had the opportunity to go to Panama with Operation Christmas Child in 2010 and actually got to hand out the shoebox gifts to kids at several different locations in Panama. You can see the videos and read about it, but it's nothing like actually being there, handing a box to a child and to see how happy they are over the simplest things like school supplies, pens and pencils, crayons, and maybe a few toys. What really touched me is how much these children need these things and really appreciate them."
Fellowship with other volunteers is also an important aspect of Cowgill's volunteer efforts.
"I like working with so many great volunteers from other places, from our church (First United Methodist Church in Elkins) and with volunteers all over the country," he said. "It takes about 80,000 to 90,000 volunteers just to process these boxes in the United States. It just takes a lot of people working together and that is what I like, working together with several different folks and people from all walks of life."
In addition to Operation Christmas Child, Cowgill also volunteers with the Foster Grandparent Program at area elementary schools, the school backpack food program and Warriors in the Field.
Operation Christmas Child is the world's largest Christmas project of its kind, using gifts of toys, basic items of necessity and clothing to spread the gospel to children ages 2 to 14. Donations help supply literature of the gospel that introduces a discipleship program called "The Greatest Journey," which is placed into the boxes before preparations for shipment.
Since the beginning of the project in 1993, Samaritan's Purse has collected and delivered more than 124 million gift-filled shoeboxes to children in more than 150 countries and territories. More than 4.7 million children have participated in "The Greatest Journey" program, implemented through a global church network.
According to the organization's mission statement, Samaritan's Purse is a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization providing spiritual and physical aid to people around the world. Since 1970, Samaritan's Purse has helped meet the needs of people who are victims of war, poverty, natural disasters, disease and famine.
Operation Christmas Child also offers a year-round opportunity to pack personalized shoe boxes online. Anyone interested can visit samaritanspurse.org/occ to select toys and gift items, write a note of encouragement and "pack" them in a shoebox. To follow the box's journey from the website to the country and child, there is a donation form available on the site.