Tony: We're down on numbers, yes. Definitely down on numbers this year. We've got around about a thousand in at the moment. We're just coming up to the peak period. Last year this period we had three and a half thousand boxes in the warehouse ready to be checked.

Sarah: OK. So we're down quite a bit at the moment - hoping that people will dig deep into their pockets and do this. What difference does it really make; because I know that obviously with recession, some people are going to be in a position that for their own children they're going to have to buy less? Why is it so important to give to a child that you've never met before that lives in a completely different country. What's the importance of it?

Tony: The importance basically is that this child that you're giving this shoe box to, full of toys or whatever you want to put in it, will have had nothing before; will never ever have had a present; and this could be the only present they have during their childhood.

Sarah: So they've never been given a gift. What kind of financial situation are they actually in. Are we talking absolute poverty and if that's so, what does that look like?

Tony: What does poverty look like? Yes they are in absolute poverty and what does poverty look like? Try a hole in a side of the hill covered with a plastic sheet; a mother and four children are living in that hole. That's one of the scenarios that I visited. We've got children with no parents at all living in sewers and underground pipelines just living there. The youngest I've met, and I went down this sewer to fetch this kid out, was five years old, and he was living in a sewer. These children have to steal food. But they don't just have to steal it for themselves. They steal it to feed the rats that they live with, so that the rats don't bite.

Poverty. We don't really know what poverty is in the UK. When you get up in the morning there's always somewhere you can go to get a free meal, a free cup of tea. If you live on the streets, there's always somewhere you can go. These kids have got nowhere. What we do now when I'm over there, this is in Romania basically, is we find these kids - we get them out of where they're living, take them to a drop-in centre; then work with these kids to sort of say - let's find you somewhere to live properly. A drop-in centre is here for you and you come to the drop-in centre and then when we find somewhere for you to live that'll be good - that'll be great.

Sarah: So operation Christmas Child and the Samaritans Purse is not just a one-off Christmas wonder of nice surprises. There is an ongoing aim to take children out of poverty.

Tony: It's an ongoing aim to do quite a few things actually. Where the shoe boxes get us into villages, such as in Africa and India, we can have a look around the village to see what they need; and a lot of places they're living with no water supply. A child or a mother has to walk so many miles to a dirty river or pond to pull the water. We can now drill a well for them - give them water filters. Water bound diseases are absolutely murderous out there. Say this interview took twenty minutes; you can say that five hundred kids have died in twenty minutes due to water bound diseases. It's frightening. We go out to places where AIDs has taken the parents away and help out there to do things, that brings some joy to these kids, who've got nothing in their lives.

Sarah: So Tony, from what you've been telling me you've obviously been to a number of different countries and seen poverty at it's worse and seen some pretty horrendous situations. You talk to me about how when you give an Operation Christmas Box to a child and they open it up and they've got the gift, you see the most amazing smiles on the children's faces. Have you got any specific highlights from those moments that you'd like to share with us?

Tony: There is one particular one that I always call the power of prayer; because I believe prayer does work. It's basically a little boy, he's standing in a queue and he's waiting for his shoe box. Through an interpreter he said, I've been praying to Jesus. Now please keep this in mind, this is in the Ukraine. He's been praying to Jesus: this is very very unusual. All he's been praying for is a little toy; an aeroplane that you can put on the floor, pull back, let it go and it shoots across the floor. So on these distributions, we get a box dropped alongside us and basically inside that box is 16 shoe boxes. 1.3 million shoe boxes and this little boy's in the queue; you put your hand in the box, you pull it out, you pass the box to the little boy and say Jesus loves you. He goes away and opens his shoe box and what's there right on top - and remember these shoe boxes are sealed, nobody really knows what's in any of them; right on top, not down the sides and not at the bottom, right on top - a little aeroplane that you can put on the floor, pull back and let go.

Sarah: Wow!

Tony: If that isn't the power of prayer I don't know what is.

Sarah: That's awesome. That little boy must have been so excited, on lots of levels; getting a gift because he hasn't got anything and then also to know that Jesus answers prayers.

Tony: Well yes. Every time I tell the story and I've told it a number of times, it brings tears to my eyes. To think that that little boy got what he wanted just through prayer.