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.

Looks for your lids

Christmas is fast approaching but there’s still plenty of time to get crafty with the decorations!  

The halls may get decked with boughs of holly, and the living room play host to a festive fairy. But sadly the toilet is often the poor relation in the festoonery stakes.

And what could be more welcoming in the smallest room in the house than a seasonal loo seat cover? A cosy Santa could greet you and your guests on every visit.

Of course you could spend a penny or two and buy one; there’s plenty of choice out there.

Santa Toilet Seat cover and rug set: you can buy it here: 

www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00465S1ZG/show06-20/

For instructions on how to make this festive loo lid, see www.tackyliving.com/article.php?id=39

But it really couldn’t be easier to make one yourself. All you need are some scraps of fabric in festive colours and a bit of inspiration, which is easily found by searching for ‘Christmas toilet seat cover’ in your browser. Or just look around at Christmas cards, shopping catalogues and seasonal wrapping paper for simple 2D image ideas. If Santa’s face doesn’t do it for you, how about a snowman, reindeer, Christmas tree or the words ‘Ho Ho Ho’?

Use the toilet lid as your template to cut out the backing fabric, and then stitch or glue the features onto it. You could even add a bit of tinsel to make things go with a real sparkle.  The fabric cover can be attached to the loo lid with some elastic, or you could fashion a tuck-in pocket, like the ones on pillow cases. 

For full sewing instructions, click here

If you really get in the mood, you could incorporate the cistern lid and floor mat into your scheme.

And if sewing isn’t your thing but you’re handy with a bit of crafty painting, consider getting a cheap loo seat and customising it to use over the winterval period. Instructions can be found here

Merry making to one and all!

What a day!

Some days are routine, even downright boring. Others can leave us reeling as we try to assess dramatic changes. We’d surely much prefer to borrow Shakespeare’s description of heaven and be ‘as merry as the day is long’.

Sometimes, time seems to run fast (weekends!) and at other times it copies the snail - especially when we’re in the dentist’s chair. We have no memory of the day of our birth, and are unlikely to know the day of our death. They are funny old things, days. The poet Philip Larkin seemed to agree, asking: ‘What are days for?’

Even animals, it seems, have bad hair days.  

Photo: Brian Snelson from Hockley, Essex, England (Bad hair day) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Many of us will have endured a bad hair day, and wages slaves often pine for a duvet day. But don’t let’s forget the red letter days - the term comes from the habit of marking church festivals on calendars in red ink - and halcyon days, those calm summer times we look back on nostalgically.   

Halcyon days by the seaside Photo © Louise Thomas

No doubt Mr Larkin would have appreciated World Poetry Day (21 March, since you ask) and as a librarian he might have marked World Book and Copyright Day (23 April). But World Toilet Day (19 November)? What’s that all about?

It may sound laughable or even ridiculous to those who don’t realise how many people have no access to a decent loo:  40% of the world’s population face a daily struggle to find somewhere private to use in place of a toilet. That’s 2.6bn men, women and children made vulnerable to the legion of diseases that come with lack of sanitation. Every 20 seconds a child under 5 years old dies because of dirty water and poor sanitation.  And women and girls are particularly vulnerable to rape and snake bites as they squat in the grass.  

Those are appalling facts that need publicising in order to bring about the desire for change, and having a 'day' helps gain publicity.

Philip Larkin continued his quest for the purpose of a day by writing ‘They are to be happy in’, and Dinah Washington sang ‘What a difference a day makes’. So this year, why not mark World Toilet Day by making a real and lasting difference to the lives of people living in poverty by twinning your toilet? And if you are on Twitter, please tweet when you have done it to pass the message on.  

Carpe Diem! Seize the Day!

You can hear Philip Larkin reading his poem ‘Days’ here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW7mecoPEBs  

Curry, cawl and mummies

Curry is known to provoke a flushing-out of some people’s inner tubes. So naturally it was dish of the day – along with a Welsh cawl (soup) – at the Maesteg Christian Centre’s recent Toilet Twinning fundraiser. 

But not to worry: there was plenty of toilet tissue at hand, and even a toilet (although apparently it was there to collect the cash donations).

On the throne for the night was champion toilet twinner, Gweirydd Williams, from Bridgend, South Wales. He had lined up a quiz for guests, including a real stinker of a question: ‘How much poo can a human body hold?’  (Answer: up to 25 pounds).

The loo paper gave the young people an excuse to play the Egyptian mummy game, and a total of £500 was literally thrown down the (unplumbed) toilet.

Gweirydd is an environmental health officer, so he knows a thing or two about the importance of having a safe and hygienic place to go to the loo. He’s already fundraised to twin 34 toilets, and the Maesteg event’s success brings the total up by a further nine! Thank you Gweirydd and the people of Maesteg. 

[See the blog below: ‘Champion twinner Gweirydd Williams talks to Toilet Twinning’ for more information on Gweirydd’s fundraising activities.]

Blue ice from the sky, brown poo on the ground

  The prospect of frozen sewage falling out of the sky is not one to gladden the heart.  But recent reports from Long Island, USA, tell of several houses left with gaping holes in their roofs.   Material accidentally jettisoned from aircraft lavatories is thought to be responsible.  This ‘blue ice’, as it is known, is a mixture of human waste and blue disinfectant, frozen at high altitudes. 

  In 2007 a couple in Leicestershire received a similar gift from above and had to keep a lump of the matter in their freezer, for insurance purposes.  Although it was triple wrapped, they felt sure they would be throwing away any frozen food sharing the space.

  Back in Tudor England, before the advent of piped sewage systems,  ‘gong farmers’ worked under cover of darkness to remove human excrement from privies and cesspits.  This was, at least, an advance on medieval days when a shout of ‘gardyloo’ would warn of waste about to be thrown out of upstairs windows. Modern-day gamers can test their skills at catching falling poo here www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/games/gong-farmer-game

  Our bodily waste matter, it seems, gets everywhere. 

  Many people in the world’s poorest countries have no option but to practice open defecation.  The hygiene issues of having untreated sewage lying around, along with the embarrassing lack of privacy, are immediately obvious. 

Aelech Tomas from Ethiopia      Photo: Tearfund/Will Boase

  Mapping defecation areas can bring home the scale of the problem and stimulate a desire for change in communities without decent sanitation facilities.  They are encouraged to create a simple map, often drawn on the ground, and households mark themselves and any existing latrines using a leaf or stone. Then they can add areas of open defecation, triggering discussion about distance walked, safety, contamination of water supply, the effects of faeces on the ground and how it degrades.  

  Sometimes little flags are used to mark the faeces, and the weight of the solid waste produced weekly, monthly or annually can be calculated.  This aids the debate and gets people interested in constructing toilets.  

  Aeylech Tomas (pictured above), from the village of Kisho, Ethiopia, sums up the need for universal access to latrines.   She is full of fear every time she has to go to the toilet in the open:  ‘I am always afraid that someone might see me. If the boys or men see us they might attack or rape us. I feel sad; this is not a good life.’ 

  There are some things in this world we are right to be angry about.