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Students play secret Santa to troops in Afghanistan
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Students from Campbell Middle School get ready to load 50 care packages for troops in Afghanistan into a mail truck. With the help of local postmaster John Dickey, students in Amanda Bowker’s seventh- and eighth-grade accelerated classes prepared the packages this week. They sent them off Thursday afternoon.
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Campbell Middle School student Alyssa Gavlek, right, hands a care package to postal worker Sue Hamilton.
By Jeanne Starmack
CAMPBELL
Troops based out of Vienna have secret Santas to make being stuck in Afghanistan for Christmas a little easier to take.
Students in Amanda Bowker’s seventh- and eighth-grade accelerated classes at Campbell Middle School loaded a mail truck Thursday afternoon with 50 boxes containing everything from candy to soap to books to games to clothes for troops who have to stay on duty this year. Helping out were Sue Hamilton, a postal worker at the Campbell post office, and John Dickey, the postmaster there.
Lucky recipients are with the 451st Expeditionary Logistics Readiness Squadron at the Kandahar Airport.
Dickey, a veteran himself, has signs up at the post office encouraging people to send supplies to local troops. Approximately eight troops in the unit are either Campbell residents or related to Campbell students, he said.
“Ask me how,” his signs say, and that’s exactly what Bowker did.
“She called me and asked me how to send the boxes,” he said. “I said, ‘these are very difficult to address. It’s a customs form that has to be very specific.’ So I came over [to the school] Tuesday, and I showed them how.”
Bowker called him Wednesday night, he said, to tell him the boxes were ready.
At 3:15 p.m. Thursday, Hamilton was waiting at the school with a mail truck.
The students helped put the boxes in the back of it, saying they felt good about showing appreciation for the troops.
“It feels good to know you’re bringing a piece of home to them,” said Madelyn Colon, 12, a seventh-grader.
Elaina Best, 12, also a seventh-grader, said she feels like she’s making it easier for the troops to be in Afghanistan. “I feel like I’m brightening their day,” she said. Elaina’s uncle, Tom Ridge, of Georgia, is in the unit.
Bowker, a substitute teacher whose been with the students all year until her last day today, said the inspiration for the boxes came from a novel called “Scat” that they’re reading for the English Festival in March at Youngstown State University.
In the novel, one of the main character’s fathers is in the military, she said.
Donations for the boxes came from all classes in the elementary and middle schools. Each class also donated $14 to help with shipping costs.
But the biggest donor, Bowker said, was Sylvia Iatropoulos. She sponsored six boxes, at $14 each, and also donated $200 toward the $625 in shipping costs.
Iatropoulos has two children in the Campbell district — Kalli, a fifth-grader, and George, a third-grader. It was Kalli, she said, who asked her to help with donations for the troops.
“When I see the families on TV — they’re serving our country ... we need to get together and give back,” Iatropoulos said.