Having your cake and eating it

Boris Johnson once said, ‘My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.’ Whatever your politics, it’s hard to dislike this statement: cake is, after all, one of the pleasures of life. And when it comes to fundraising for Toilet Twinning, it seems to occupy a pretty central role. Or should that be ‘roll’... and Swiss, naturally!

Here's a snapshot of some recent events that have raised plenty of dough, to help people living in poverty build loos and learn about hygiene:

Lenzie Union Parish Church in Scotland, along with three local schools and several associated youth organisations have all been baking furiously for Toilet Twinning funds. Parish youth worker Edgar de Blieck reported that one young girl baked all day Saturday and into the evening for a cake sale and raised enough for no fewer than nine twinnings. Another boy made shortbread and sold it on a friend's market stall.

A pupil at Kent’s Roseacre School acknowledged the serious message that underlies the humour of Toilet Twinning. She told her fellow students, “I know you are going to laugh but you can stop it right now, because this is serious.” They were certainly serious about fundraising: they held cake, toy and book sales and raised enough to twin all 12 of their toilets.

Craig Bishop, a vicar in the South Cotswolds Team Ministry, tweeted to tell us that his Lent lunch and cake and brownie sales had enabled him to twin two of his vicarage loos. His daughters were looking forward to taking the certificates to their school show & tell.

In Frome, Somerset, the launch of a community toilet scheme has been a good chance for Councillor Peter Macfadyen to encourage twinning as well. Several local businesses including The Old Bath Arms, have taken the plunge(r). Could this be the start of many town-wide twinnings? 

Girl Guides, Brownies and Rainbows from Slough celebrated World Thinking Day by hosting activities with an international flavour, such as African drumming and line dancing. They donated the entry fees to Toilet Twinning. 

Pupils and staff at Kemnay Academy, Aberdeen, sold fairtrade products in their tuckshop and are using the profits to twin with a school toilet block.

Visitors to Boscastle Rectory in Cornwall lobbed their donations into an old bed pan when they enjoyed a coffee morning and raffle at Rev Robert Thewsey’s home.

Malcolm and Lubala, a couple getting married in Sussex in July, have requested donations to Toilet Twinning in place of presents. They are also planning to have ‘spend a penny’ collection tins at the reception.

64th Glasgow Girls' Brigade raised £830 for Toilet Twinning, by cleverly using their 60th anniversary as a link to the £60 cost of a twinning.

Vale of Glamorgan environmental health officer, Rowan Hughes, took the direct approach by asking his local mayor to twin the town hall toilet - and was flushed with success, naturally.

Royal Holloway College student, Lucy Milne, made headlines in Surrey newspapers after she secretly twinned her mum’s loo as a surprise gift - only to find her mum had secretly done exactly the same for her. What’s more, they found their twinned Ugandan loos were only 300 metres apart.

Our supporters display a wealth of ingenious ways to raise their pounds so that others can spend their pennies in privacy, and they clearly have fun too. Thank you so much.

Maybe you feel your personal time is sliced up too thinly, or perhaps you sometimes find yourself at a bit of a loose end. But there’s one thing certain: enjoying the company of others while raising money for Toilet Twinning is a piece of cake!

Books and Bogs

It goes without saying that your first action on visiting your loo will be to gaze lovingly at your Toilet Twinning certificate and think about the people who are using their latrine in a faraway place.

But for many of us, the few minutes we spend behind the closed door of the smallest room might be the only chances we get to pause in a busy day. Indeed there’s a poem (or prayer, depending on your viewpoint) called ‘Slow me down Lord’ which speaks of the importance of these little rests in our routines:

Teach me the art of taking MINUTE vacations,

Of slowing down to look at a flower,

to chat with a friend,

to pat a dog,

to read a few lines of a good book. 

So maybe your only chance to read a good book happens on your ‘minute vacation’ in your toilet. But what to read? Well, the Times Educational Supplement has recently published a ‘Teachers’ Top 100 Books’ list - a goldmine for readers gleaned from the top 10 favourites of 500 teachers.

How many have you read? How many do you want to read? Do you even agree with their choices? The Times Ed seems to be expecting dissent, because they commented, ‘Very little, beyond politics and religion, divides people quite like a list.’

And remembering all those junior school jokes about book titles like ‘The Highwayman’ by Ann Dover, what could you suggest as great titles to read while enthroned in your private space? Let’s get the obvious ‘Winnie The Pooh’ by A A Milne out on the pedestal mat right away and open up this serious debate!

Pain in the neck?

Feeling the weight of water in South Sudan.  Photo: Layton Thompson/Tearfund

‘They’re so graceful!’ ‘ They make it look so easy!’  ‘Of course they’ve been doing it all their lives.’

These might be common reactions to seeing women and children in developing countries carrying heavy loads on their heads.There’s a sort of residual feeling that it must be good for the posture: none of that weighed-down, lop-sided lugging of our weekly shop in a plastic bag that’s cutting into our fingers.

But the reality is distressingly different. It’s one of the reasons why Toilet Twinning is concerned with the holistic improvement of water supply as well as sanitation, latrine provision and hygiene education.

We know that women in communities without access to running water spend hours of their lives fetching and carrying - and the carrying is almost always done on their heads.They are frequently transporting the equivalent of 20 litre-bottles of water and often walking barefoot along paths that may be steep and stony, unstable, or fraught with potential dangers from both humans and animals. And perhaps they are doing all this on an empty stomach or during periods of sickness.

Professor Ray Lloyd, a sports scientist at the University of Abertay Dundee, was concerned about this. He conducted research on a group of 24 South African women from the Xhosa people and compared them with nine British Territorial Army Women.

His tests found that life-long experience of carrying loads on the head did not make it physically easier to do so, nor did it protect against pain and discomfort.

‘All the experienced head-loaders reported that neck pain was a big problem for them,’ he said, adding: ‘They reported having to give neck massages to their mothers and grandmothers whenever they returned from fetching water.

‘All the women agreed that they would prefer an alternative method of transporting essential items such as water and firewood.’

And the pain factor is just one part of this scandal - imagine having to commit a major part of your day to collecting water, and perhaps missing out on schooling to do so.

This World Water Day (22 March), feel free to express some righteous anger about this! Could you encourage your community group, workplace, school, church etc to twin their toilets? Or use social media inform others about Toilet Twinning? Or maybe write something for a publication you have an interest in? Let’s keep at it until water and sanitation are a universal right, not a privilege.

Happy Birthday Dr John Snow. We salute you.

If you had to pay £200 to publish a book that only brought in an income of £3.50, you might feel something of a failure.  

Fortunately for the world, one characteristic of confident people is that they don’t let failure hold them back.  

Dr John Snow, who was born 200 years ago on 15 March 1813, must have been such a man. He was the son of a Yorkshire labourer but was able to ‘better himself’ through his apprenticeship to a surgeon.  He also became the author of the ‘failed’ book.

Snow mistrusted the prevailing theory that cholera was an airborne disease, caused by bad air or ‘miasma’, and he stuck to his guns. He believed it was spread through impure water.

However, his famous book, ‘On the Mode of Communication of Cholera’ was widely dismissed by the learned journals of the day. "There is, in our view, an entire failure of proof that the occurrence of any one case could be clearly and unambiguously assigned to water" one reviewer noted.  

When Dr Snow published his book in 1849 he was still five years short of getting the vital proof.  His chance came with an outbreak of the deadly disease in the London district of Soho, when 500 people lost their lives.  Mapping the deaths showed a cluster round a water pump; he insisted the handle was removed and the deaths dwindled.

Dr Snow's map showing cholera cases clustered around the Broad Street pump, Soho

It seems the Soho outbreak had been caused by a mother washing her sick baby’s soiled nappy:  the contaminated water is thought to have seeped into the drinking supply. The woman’s chore was an everyday action which many of us might have unwittingly carried out.  

Perhaps, 200 years later, we need to catch some of Dr Snow’s confidence. Confidence that we can overcome the uneven distribution of decent sanitation in our world. Confidence in the belief that a clean, hygienic toilet is not just a comfortable luxury but a vital bit of kit that keeps us healthy. Confidence that it is therefore our right and duty to demand good sanitation for everyone, everywhere.  

This is the spirit which World Water Day, 22 March, seeks to harness, and in homage to Dr John Snow may we all do whatever we can (like twinning a toilet perhaps?) to bring about universal decent sanitation.

Pic: Ceridwen

Putting the Fun into Fundraising

Naturally, at Toilet Twinning, we are absolutely thrilled when people choose to fundraise for us, because the money raised allows us to do what we’re passionate about: bringing good sanitation and clean water to more of the world’s population.  

But where do you begin if you want to fundraise but don’t quite know how?  

Our top tip is don’t be afraid to be a bit quirky!   There are many wacky toilet-related ideas to play around with, which means you’ll not only have fun but also attract attention (and hopefully funds) at the same time.  

Intrepid supporter Sulin Milne organised a host of activities, including a sponsored wheelbarrow push of about 23 miles, with the barrow full of toilet rolls, a potty and other toilet-related items (photo below).

Toilet Twinning chuckled along with Emily Heather and her friend Hayley Williams, who did a 10 km ‘toilet trot’ along the seafront in Devon, with their trousers round their ankles.  But the serious business was done too, with £150 raised via an online giving page, and press coverage to boot (photos below).

Champion twinner Gweirydd Williams (52 twins and counting) ramped up the toilet humour by employing an unplumbed loo as a collection box at his church ‘Curry, Cawl and Mummies’ night - the ‘mummies’ came wrapped in toilet paper, naturally (you can read the full details at our blog posted on 19 October 2012).   For sheer wince-factor, you can’t beat his back waxing (you can see it here ) and he has yet to reveal his sponsorship idea for 2013: ‘at the moment it is under wraps’ he said coyly. 

Staff at Specsavers in Bridport, Dorset, donned eighties gear - reason unknown, but we’re sure they enjoyed those wigs and shoulder pads -  to pedal 180km for Toilet Twinning.  On a serious note, the distance was chosen to symbolise the 180 children who die every hour as a result of poor sanitation.

Eleven-year old Fred Tocque, from Flintshire, took the charity chop and sacrificed the long locks he’d been growing for years.  He said: ‘I decided to get my hair cut because it was getting in the way’ and in the process was able to put a stunning £500 into his scout troop’s Toilet Twinning fund.

Don’t forget that Toilet Twinning is ready to support you too - we are shortly launching teaching materials and fun items especially for schools to use, (more of that in a future blog), but in the meantime visit our resources page here where you will find posters, T shirts, stickers and much more to help you fundraise.

Of course, while your fundraising is vital to us, just talking about Toilet Twinning is a really great way to support us too.  So if you can tweet or post on Facebook,  or mention us on other forms of social media, don’t hold back. Perhaps you could do a talk about Toilet Twinning (we’ve got a powerpoint and film on the resources page which you can use), tell your local press and radio about your event, or simply talk enthusiastically about us to your friends: all these activities help to spread the word.

And remember you can gift twin someone else’s toilet - great for those friends and rellies who are hard to buy for, and a talking point for visitors spotting the framed certificate.  You can opt to personalise the wording on the certificate, and Toilet Twinning will happily add a gift card into the parcel.

Thank you: happy fundraising and may you all be flushed with success!

Home and Away

Refugees arriving in Chad.  Photo: Geoff Crawford/Tearfund

Millions of children worldwide experience the pain of being torn from their known universe and carried along on a journey that must seem incredibly bewildering to them.  

If you’ve ever been homesick, you will know just how painful that boundary between ‘home’ and anywhere else can be.  For most of us it is a mercifully fleeting experience.  For refugees it can be a life sentence,  frequently starting from a very young age.

And the place they land up in is probably not ready or especially able to receive and nurture them. That’s where you come in. Through Toilet Twinning you are now able to twin with toilet blocks built in schools for refugee children in Eastern Chad.  

A refugee is legally defined as a person who is outside his or her country of nationality and is unable to return due to a well-founded fear of persecution. In 2011 there were 15.2 million refugees in the world, and 80% of them were estimated to be women and children.  

There are several hundred thousand refugees living in camps in Chad, many of them displaced from the Darfur region of neighbouring Sudan. Eastern Chad, which borders Sudan, is a semi-arid area with scarce natural resources, subject to droughts, floods and epidemics. So the influx of Sudani refugees weighs heavily on the host communities. What’s more, their chances of returning home are slim.  

Providing water and sanitation, food, shelter and health services are basic life-savers in this environment. Education is vital for all the usual reasons, but also to protect boys from forced recruitment and discourage early marriage for girls.

Twinning your toilet or toilets with a school block in a refugee camp in Chad is a straightforward thing to do, but the consequences can be profound for those suffering the sting of dislocation.  

Lemon-aid

A few weeks into the new year, and time for a reality check on those bravely-made resolutions. Are you powering ahead nicely or is your enthusiasm and optimism beginning to waver? 

Optimism is a fine quality, especially if tempered with a healthy dose of realism. Optimists are natural adherents to the saying: ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade’. 

And sometimes life certainly does deal us some pretty lemon-y lemons. 

Photo (c) Hans Hillewaert

In the developed world, we are unlikely to have to live without basic necessities - such as flush toilets and running water -  for more than the duration of an emergency. But for many people on our planet this is the reality of daily life. 

Why some of us are born into relative wealth and others into relative poverty can either be regarded as a mystery or the luck of the draw, depending on your point of view. An optimist’s view would be that there is always hope of improvement. And thanks to toilet twinners - all 12,000 of you and rising - this hope and optimism can be transformed into reality. 

The Henderson family, who became our 10,000th twinners, show off their Toilet Twinning certificate .
Photo (c) Simon Henderson /www.mustardseedcards.co.uk

Twinning your toilet is a brilliant way to make a real difference to people’s lives. Through Toilet Twinning, your money and your optimism for a better world can be matched with the energy and the hope of the communities we work with.  And that adds up to a whole lot of proverbial lemonade.