‘Bucket Project’ takes hope to dying Africans
By Adam Miller
NORCROSS, Ga. –– That non-descript, five-gallon bucket in your garage once contained paint. Now it’s a catch-all for rags and used brushes. The last thing you’d call it is “precious.”
In Zambia and South Africa, however, that’s precisely the word people would use to describe those buckets. The plastic containers carry hope – when congregations like Hebron Baptist Church in Norcross, Ga., fill them with precious healthcare supplies that bring comfort to people dying of terminal illnesses.
Hebron packed more than 400 of the buckets this past summer with everyday items most Americans take for granted but are impossible to come by for poor families in Sub-Saharan Africa. Sheets and towels, Blistex and multivitamins are plentiful in the U.S., but in Africa they are rare items essential for providing a safe, sterile environment for hospice care.
Even the empty buckets will be prized possessions long after the contents are gone. They carry water long distances, provide animal-resistant food storage and guard valuables from the elements.
“It touched my heart to think, ‘Here is a box of basic things we take for granted,” says Linda Toop, who led volunteers through the project at Hebron. “To think these people have never had their own sheets or bar of soap and it took them dying of AIDS to get something of value.”
Packing the buckets was a great way to help suffering people experience the love of Christ, says Glen Rowden, associate pastor of evangelism at Hebron. “God calls us as believers to care like he cares.”
In this case, caring like Christ meant corralling a hundred or more volunteers, making several trips to Wal-Mart and other stores, months of meticulous packing and the prayer and hope that customs in other countries would wave the buckets through to their final destinations. “The Bucket Project,” as Hebron called it, is part of the In-Home Care Kit initiative developed by Baptist Global Response.
The 2009 In-Home Care Kit project sent 3,200 kits to South Africa, Zambia, Kenya, Lesotho, and Mozambique. BGR’s goal for 2010 is to provide 5,000 kits to help families in need.
More than 22.4 million people in Sub Saharan Africa live with HIV and more than 1 million die each year from opportunistic diseases such as cancer or tuberculosis when the patient’s immune system is weakened by HIV. Because of poverty and poor infrastructure, victims of these diseases usually die without any medical care or comfort. Most die without the relief of even the simplest first aid techniques.
Hebron joined more than a dozen other churches in northwest Atlanta in making trips to local stores for items an African could go a whole lifetime without seeing. As local churches joined the effort, stores sold out of some items almost immediately.
Members Chuck and Stacey Warbington, who involved their four children in the project, bought one store’s entire supply of lip balm in putting together their buckets.
“Doing this was a way of teaching our kids how to love through actions,” says Chuck. “This was a time to teach our children and to remind us adults that, while these seem like such small items, they were going to be gold for these people.”
From June until late August, a children’s classroom – filled with buckets, towels, Blistex, scrub brushes, latex gloves, sheets, wash cloths, multi-vitamins, and about a dozen other everyday items – turned into a frenzy of volunteer activity. The project began as part of a summer missions emphasis that included North American and international missions. It ended with a fast and furious loading of a trailer that would send the much-needed supplies on their way to aid workers across the Atlantic.
“We said a prayer over every bucket, that they would get to the people who needed them most and that they’d get there without any problems,” Toop says.
“It was sobering to tell our children as we packed and snapped those buckets closed, ‘These are going to places where people aren’t well,’” Warbington adds. “Then to load them together on a truck and know they were going to Africa.”
“Our kids still ask us over breakfast or dinner sometimes whether this or that made it,” he says. “That’s the greatest takeaway. For our children – and for us – to realize that something we do here can change someone’s life thousands of miles away.”
