It started before sunup with an announcement on the school’s Web site, and by 7 a.m. a round of phone calls was spreading the disappointing news. While children across the Pascack Valley cheered the first snow day of the year last Friday, a smaller group of students and faculty at Emerson’s Assumption Academy were learning of the cancellation of a Christmas party that would have put them face to face with Iraqi boys and girls 6,000 miles away.
“I am so bummed,” Pamela Derfus, Assumption’s director of institutional advancement, sighed into her phone early Friday morning.
The students at Assumption Academy were scheduled to celebrate the holiday with the children of St. George’s Memorial, an Anglican Church in Baghdad, via a live Webcast. There would be singing and presents and good cheer all around anticipated school officials, a timely precursor to the upcoming winter break and the perfect culmination to a community service project spanning six weeks and eight time zones.
Assumption Academy first used Webcast technology last month when, in honor of Veteran’s Day, students had a live conversation with Major John Tumino of the New Jersey National Guard – an Emerson resident and the father of two Assumption students, Olivia and Johnny – and an Iraqi man.
“We were able to talk live to them,” explained Derfus. “That really got the kids pumped up.”
Inspired, student council members ranging from fifth through eighth grades worked with Tumino, his fellow servicemen and St. George’s leaders in a project dubbed “Operation Shoebox,” which they hoped would bring Christmas to struggling Iraqi Christians.
While Operation Shoebox shares its name with an organization that ships care packages to troops, Assumption’s version was wholly the brainchild of its students and Canon Andrew White of St. George’s. White provided a list of children in his congregation, described only by age and gender, and asked that Assumption collect Christmas gifts for 150 of them.
White also asked the students to follow a few rules: No electronic devices, because of incompatible voltage. No games requiring knowledge of the English language, because not all Iraqi children are fluent. No blatantly American themes, because of the ongoing war. White said basics like hats and gloves are always needed. And, he noted, all gifts must be sent in unmarked, unwrapped shoeboxes.
“The gifts cannot bring unwanted attention to the children,” said Derfus. “The country is at war. The major [Tumino] told us they can’t get anything there. It is not the modern nation is was before the war. It was modern, as far as third world countries go. The war itself has put so much stress on the people.”
And neither its existence as a Christian church nor its proximity to Baghdad’s Green Zone has shielded St. George’s from that stress.
Established in 1936, the church went out of commission in 1990, after which it was looted down to the last pew. After the war in Iraq began in 2003, St. George’s held a service for about 50 British and American diplomats and military personnel. But as security broke down outside the Green Zone, the Westerners stopped coming. In their place came Iraqi Christians who could no longer afford the risk to travel to their own churches.
Still, it didn’t require traveling far to find danger in Baghdad, and in September 2005 the entire lay leadership of St. George’s was kidnapped and killed. Last year, a member of the new leadership was kidnapped; he was later released for ransom.
Today, St. George’s counts more than 1,000 members, but is unknown how many Iraqi Christians remain in the predominantly Muslim country due to a lack of census data, according to a recent report by the Associated Press. Before the Gulf War, it was estimated that about a million Iraqi Christians lived in the nation. Their numbers had dwindled to an estimated 800,000 by the time of the 2003 invasion. It is believed that Iraqi Christians have continued to flee the country and that the remaining population is increasingly at risk. Last week, the federal Commission on International Religious Freedom reported that Iraq is the most dangerous place on earth for religious minorities. The report cited recent attacks on Christians in the northern city of Mosul, where the archbishop was kidnapped and murdered earlier this year and more than a dozen Christians were killed this fall. More than 1,000 families reportedly fled the city this October in the wake of the violence.
Derfus said Tumino has called St. George’s children “orphans” though many of them haven’t lost both parents.“They’ve just had so much loss in their lives. The whole thing is so emotional and so difficult,” said Derfus. “Our student council took White’s list and got organized and made sure they had gifts. They sent dolls, toys, markers, Legos. A lot of Legos.”
Derfus said that Assumption students had the most difficulty buying gifts for the older Iraqi children.
“What do you send to a 12-year-old boy in Iraq? Our kids really had to think outside of the box. It was for the older kids that you saw a lot of the basics,” said Derfus.
As the deadline for donations approached, the student council was short on gifts.
“We didn’t have as many gifts as we hoped,” said Derfus. “And then on the last days, kids came pouring in with their shoeboxes. It was a riot!”
In the end, the council exceeded its goal of 150, counting more than 200 gift boxes when they were picked up by New Jersey National Guard soldiers.
Once the shoebox portion of Operation Shoebox was squared away, with gifts ready to be distributed at St. George’s Christmas party on Dec. 19, Assumption Academy students began rehearsing for the concert they would give their new friends. At a rehearsal last Thursday, Derfus (who was to man the camera for the Webcast) realized that all the students, not just the few chosen to appear on screen, were singing along to a medley of songs including “Silent Night.”
“It gave me goosebumps to hear the rest of the kids behind me,” said Derfus, “to hear what the kids in would hear. The room was just filled with joy.”
While the students were rehearsing, meteorologists were predicting blizzard-like conditions for the following day, but Derfus took the weather reports in stride.
“If it starts to snow tomorrow, I’ll just go home after the assembly,” she joked Thursday afternoon, noting that the assembly, beginning at 8 a.m., would be short, ending at 9 a.m. at the latest. “It’s the end of the day for them when it’s 8:30 here. There’s a curfew there. They have to be home by 5 p.m. The party won’t be canceled.”
But the story Friday morning was quite different. There would be no going home after the assembly; school wasn’t going to open at all.
“Unfortunately all the Pascack Valley schools are closing today because of the expected weather,” said Derfus, “so we have to close as well, which is killing me since there is not a flake outside!”
Within hours, Assumption Academy was covered by a half-foot of snow and no one was to be seen besides a man with a snowblower on the school’s lawn. Still, Operation Shoebox went off without a hitch in Baghdad, where St. George’s children enjoyed a sunny winter day with a high of 50 degrees, a visit from “Santa” (a New Jersey National Guard serviceman), and more than 200 unmarked shoeboxes filled with gifts from new friends.
For more information about St. George’s Memorial Church in Baghdad, Iraq, visit www.stchcathedral.org.bh/st-georges/stgeorge-index.htm. For more information about Assumption Academy in Emerson, visit www.assumptionacad.org.
Tagged: Community Life, emerson, feature, holidays, Iraq, new jersey, pascack valley, schools