10/08/04
| Volunteers send goodies overseas |
BY LEESHA FAULKNER
Daily Journal
TUPELO - Smith Heavner plopped down in the floor of an office on Belden Circle and started putting little items in plastic bags.
Another woman, wearing a Telephone Pioneers T-shirt slipped a note inside one of the baggies and placed it into a large box. Then Perry Smith closed the box and with the help of some others, moved it toward the door.
Council members Heavner and Smith haven't found new careers. They've become volunteers with Operation Interdependence, an organization that sends goodwill packages overseas to soldiers fighting in Iraq.
"This is a good deal and a lot of people are supporting our troops," Smith said as he fixed a box for mailing. "This wouldn't happen here in Tupelo if it wasn't for people like Vicky Porter, who volunteers her time to organize the effort for our men and women overseas."
Porter, a saleswoman, said she has a flexible schedule that allows her to come into the office and help supervise volunteers.
She explained how the process works: "We use these big boxes and pack them with enough of these quart-size ZipLock bags to support an entire platoon. We're careful about what we put in the bags. The boxes can't weigh more than 30 pounds or it'll be too hard for the troops to handle."
Rows and rows of stuff
Porter walked through the office and opened a door leading into donated warehouse space. Filling the area were rows upon rows of boxes filled with sterilized wet wipes in packages, lotion, gum, books, magazines, tissues, hard candy and other small, personal items.
"These are donations from people all over," she explained. "We recently took some from Texas because they didn't have a distribution center. But this is what we fill our bags with. And, it's all donated."
The Tupelo office sends out 23 of the big boxes to designated platoons each week. Operation Interdependence assigned the local office a group of soldiers to support. Each week, a different group gets the boxes, so that all the assigned ones get at least one mailing a month, Porter explained. Every little package contains a note from home, too.
Operation Interdependence, said Porter, evolved from the experiences of Albert R. Renteria, a chief warrant officer, during the Persian Gulf War of the 1990s. During that time, part of his assignment included distributing to soldiers goods donated by folks back home. After retiring, he thought about a better way to do the job so that people could support troops, but valuable troops overseas wouldn't be tied up distributing the boxes. Thus, when troops began shipping out to Afghanistan and Iraq, Renteria created Operation Interdependence.
For more information on how you can participate in Operation Interdependence, contact Vicky Porter at 844-7777 or 213-1585. Her e-mail address is vporter@oidelivers.org.
For more information on how you can participate in Operation Interdependence, contact Vicky Porter at 844-7777 or 213-1585. Her e-mail address is vporter@oidelivers.org.
Contact Leesha Faulkner at 678-1590 or leesha.faulkner@djournal.com