From the goat's mouth ... !
This page lists all the articles from the Oxfam Unwrapped blog. Enjoy!
What will you buy your sweetheart this Valentine’s Day?
Valentine's Day is rapidly approaching and it's high time to check out which gifts you want to suprise your sweetheart with! From fluffy cute chicks to red-hot chilis there's definitely something for your special someone at Oxfam Unwrapped! go on, give them a gift with a difference and spread the love!
A brighter 2012
Thank you to everyone who purchased Oxfam Unwrapped gifts for Christmas!
We've got some great news for all our supporters - news that is life-changing for people living in the places where we work.
We totted up all the gifts that you've bought and are delighted to reveal that you have given more than:
- 1000 pairs of chickens
- 610 piles of poo
and most impressively, provided access to safe water for 33,250 people living in poverty.
This is an incredible achievement and will make a HUGE difference to communities in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Your gifts have gone to the people who need them most, people who can now look forward to a brighter 2012.
Thank you again!
The Oxfam Unwrapped team.
Success down on the farm
Hiromena Jose Elu is from East Timor. Here he's working on his composting pit.
Thanks to Oxfam, Hiromena and his wife have learnt about terracing, and vegetable gardening including planting, composting and organic pesticides. This has increased their food sources (more vegetables), and also provides income for the months of the year when their garden cannot produce crops.
He says: “We can plant vegetables and fruit so we can sell at the market and make some money. We can plant other fruit that previously we did not have here.
“We can make $3 or $4 everyday.”
The hungry season before Oxfam came was four months, but this has been reduced to two months since they have been trained in the new techniques.
Their vegetable garden produces crops for 2-3 months of the year. They can save the money they make from selling during this time to purchase vegetables when they have none at home.
Your gifts of Train a farmer and seeds make a huge difference to farmers like Hiromena.
Gift giving generosity - top Kiwi towns
Oxfam has revealed New Zealand’s most generous towns in its first-ever Oxfam Unwrapped Generosity List.
By looking at the numbers and locations of gifts given through the Oxfam Unwrapped appeal, Oxfam has named the South Island town of Upper Moutere as the country’s most generous.
Upper Moutere ranked highest on the list for having donated the most gifts for its population size – around 152 people.
The top ten
1. Upper Moutere, Tasman
2. Takaka, Tasman
3. Ohaupo, Waikato
4. Russell, Bay of Islands
5. Paekakariki, Kapiti
6. Warkworth, Auckland region
7. Lyttelton, Christchurch
8. Port Chalmers, Dunedin
9. Collingwood, Tasman
10. Cheviot, Hurunui
The town with the highest average annual gift value (of $158.68), and far above the national average value of $18.60 was the Hauraki district town of Ngatea.
Areas with the top total gifting are Auckland, with nearly $750,000 donated over the last five years, Wellington and Christchurch.
VIP loos
Enoch and his family survived the bitter nine year Bougainville civil war by fleeing into the hills. After the conflict, they returned to their village to find it completely destroyed. Enoch knew good sanitation would be as vital for keeping the village children alive as protecting them from soldiers.
So with a little help from Oxfam, toilets became his practical, yet lifesaving, solution.
Sirovai village is on the coast of Central Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, and the soil is very sandy. When residents first tried to dig pits for latrines, the ground just caved in.
With Oxfam's help, they devised a simple and ingenious solution: build a cylinder out of wood, coat it with cement, remove the original wood frame to use again, climb inside the cement cylinder, and dig out the soil.
The concrete liner sinks down into the ground and then a toilet slab and super structure can be built on top, completing the VIP (Ventilated Improved Pit) latrine.
As an extra benefit to the community, Oxfam pays villagers to do the labour. When complete, there will be one toilet for each family in the village. You can support people like Enoch with Oxfam Unwrapped: buy the gift of a toilet today.
No bull
Milk, manure and moo-ving about, cows are a incredibly versatile gift. 
The obvious benefit is milk, which supplements poor diets and provides essential vitamin and minerals. Milk is also sold, giving people money to pay for food, clothes, medicines, transport or eductaion. Manure is a brilliant fertiliser for gardens and crops, helping to provide a bountiful garden of plenty, full to bursting with veggies that will feed a family or livestock. And transport: cows can be used to pull ploughs and carts. Plus bulls can be used to fertilse cows, ensuring that future generations capture the benefits of these bovine beauties. So your $260 is going to go a long way helping a family securing their path out of poverty.
Splash out in Vanuatu
Despite being a tourist destination, Vanuatu is one of the poorest countries in Melanesia and faces many problems. A key issue is the absence of safe water and adequate sanitation, which causes poor health and disease and severely restricts rural communities’ economic and social development.
Less than 50 per cent of the rural population has access to a reliable, safe and fully functioning water supply.
Another 40 per cent only has access to a system that is in need of repair.
Adding to this problem is the destruction caused by cyclones, which frequently hit Vanuatu. These cyclones often destroy crops, roads and homes while polluting drinking water and waterways. Any water and sanitation facilities established in the country need to be cyclone-proof. By supporting Oxfam Unwrapped with our safe water gifts, you will be giving Vanuatuans a safe reliable source of this precious resource.
Simple sanitation
Many would think the toilet is a strange thing to celebrate, but Saturday (19 Nov) is World Toilet Day and there's a lot to be said for the dunny.
Did you know for example that 2.6 billion people still don't have access to a toilet, and do their business in latrines or out in the the open? Can you imagine life without toilets? The mess, the smell, the disease?
World Toilet Day aims to break the taboo about the loo and raise awareness of the the fact that billions suffer from poor sanitation.
Oxfam wants to end needless deaths by stopping outbreaks of cholera and diarrhoea (90% of all deaths from diarrhoea are children under 5) and teaching people the importance of wwashign their hands and hygiene. We work with communities across the Pacific and Southeast Asia to improve water supply, sanitation, hygiene and management of water resources. Such improvements reduce child mortality and improve health and nutritional status (acute diarrhoea contributes to malnutrition) in a sustainable way.
You can take action too. With our gift of a poo map, you will help a community in poverty become healthier. On a map of the village, each person is asked to mark where they 'go to the toilet'. Too often the community discovers that they have been 'pooing' near food and water sources. After this disturbing lesson, families are ready to improve their hygiene and, with a little help, construct toilets.
Chooks away!
Keeping chickens is becoming more and more popular across New Zealand. Not only do they keep garden nasties like slugs at bay, they produce clutches of fresh eggs and are great to eat.
But it's not just Kiwis that can benefit from keeping chooks. We have the ideal gift for any chicken enthusiast - we're giving chickens to villagers in the Papua New Guinea's remote Highlands to use for food and breeding.
These isolated communities rarely get enough protein in their diet as their main source of meat is pigs, which are saved for eating on special occassions. Most people live off their small gardens or fish ponds, so chickens and their eggs are essential for improving diets.
Local women tend to keep the chickens, and sell the eggs, or chicks for broiler meat, giving them a source of income that's vital in paying for their children's schooling. Plus the chickens' waste makes a great natural fertiliser for their gardens. Take a look at our pair of chickens gift and give someone a present that's truly eggstraordinary!
Give the Good Life to families in East Timor, PNG and Indonesia
Gift of the week: Give the Good Life to families in East Timor, PNG and Indonesia
Do you know someone who grows their own veggies? Someone who's happiest when they're elbow deep in compost? This is
the gift for them.
They'll get a complete garden kit that will sprout a bumper bounty of fresh and nutritious vegetables - without getting a grass stain.
That's becase we'll use the money to equip people in East Timor, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea with a range of seeds and gardening skills.
For just $20, this gift will provide people with high-quality seeds and training in the use of organic fertilisers and how to improve soil quality, so that they can grow a wider variety of vegetables, and reduce the risk of malnutrition in their communities.