This Sunday marks Mother’s Day, where families celebrate the woman who reared, fed, clothed and cared for the household. While most moms in North America are showered with flowers, breakfast in bed and jewelry, others in developing nations are presented with livestock, wells and seeds to grow plants – valuable gifts that keep food on the table and even provide income so parents can afford to send their kids to school.
GALLERY: Moms around the world
Juliet O’Neill of Oxfam Canada writes about the organization’s Unwrapped gift program, where Canadians can buy their loved ones gifts that help people around the world.
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My mother is the heart of our family, the one with the big picture view who keeps us all informed of what’s up in each other’s lives –daughters and grandchildren and those close to us.
She is a food queen, cooking and baking, leaving delightful surprises in our fridges or kitchen counters while we’re out –literally dishing out her love.
She’s a gardener, starting lily bulbs indoors as soon as spring is in sight, readying stalks for the sunflowers that grow as high as 10 feet in her award-winning apartment block garden. Birds feed and water on her patio; it’s a safe space.
One day I was telling her I’d bought a well for my friends through the Oxfam Unwrapped gift program. At Unwrapped.ca online or by phone you can buy seeds, garden tools, a goat, donkey, chickens or a beehive, a water pump, training courses and lots of other useful things for people who have so little in countries where Oxfam works.
Known as ‘the gift that gives twice,’ because you buy them for a friend or family member, they go to help someone in Africa or Asia or Latin America.
“I don’t have a goat,” Mom hinted. That made my mind up for a Mother’s Day gift. Then I started looking through Oxfam’s archives from the last few years to find mothers who had received a goat or benefitted from an Oxfam program paid through Unwrapped funds. I hope you enjoy my favourite photos.
O’Neill joined Oxfam Canada as media relations officer in August 2011, after a career in journalism in Canada, the United States, Europe, and the former Soviet Union. She works at Oxfam’s national office in Ottawa.
Unwrapped by the numbers:
• Since Oxfam Unwrapped in Canada began in 2006, the program has raised over $3.2 million for Oxfam Canada’s work around the world in countries like Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Guatemala.
In 2011, Canadians purchased:
• 4,220 goats. (Goats are given to families to help them earn income. When the goats have a kid, the first kid is passed on to a new family to multiply the effect of the gift.)
• 8,840 Chickens
• 2,005 gifts that send a girl to school
• 1,693 gifts that plant 50 trees
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