Last Minute Gifts Christmas Gifts

This post is directed at who may have slacked off a little in your holiday shopping, ahem, like me. Newsflash: Christmas is two days away, Hanukkah has already started, and Kurban Bayram is less than a week away. If none of these are your holidays…buy a gift anyway!

I’ve already posted the Top 10 Gifts For A TEFL Teacher, and the Top 5: Gifts For EFL Teachers To Send Home…here are my top last minute choices: four charities where you can make a donation on someone’s behalf. They are “last minute” because you can arrange them from the comfort of your own computer, as you read the TEFL Logue no less.

Know a dog lover? Or a fan of Turkey,the country? What neater gift to give than a donation of food to a grassroots organization that runs a spay/neuter program for stray dogs outside Istanbul in the holiday town of Sile. They also run a small shelter, and if you donate food (less bureaocratic to process than monetary donations), volunteers can focus their monetary efforts on the spay/neuter program which is a more long-term solution. Directions for how to navigate the Turkish Migros page follow in the comments section.

For loved ones with a thing for India, consider Kids With Cameras, the NGO founded by photographer/documentary film maker/photography teacher Zana Briski.

I saw the documentary film Born Into Brothels prior to traveling to India, and it’s amazing. If you donate money or buy a soundtrack or print, the money goes towards funding future photographic projects (others have included Jerusalem, Haiti, and Cairo), exhibitions and the Kids with Cameras School of Leadership and the Arts.

Another excellent effort comes from Conor, a Bootsnall member with a Bootsnall blog entitled How Conor Is Spending All His Money. In short, he’s helping finance, build and run a school and residence for orphans in Nepal, some (or all?) of whom are victims of trafficking. Check out the sole post w€here he mentions the need for donations and the donation page itself.

Finally, Heifer International is a neat standby. You can donate, for example, a whole cow to a family in a developing country (for $500, or share a heifer for the bargain rate of $50), or, say, a flock of geese (which are cheaper at $20 per flock). In all seriousness, geese can adapt to life in a variety of conditions and provide meat, eggs and/or feathers to a family, not to mention guard animals of a sort.

I’ll be honest: I’m not a big donator myself, but I appreciate the opportunity a blog like this one affords me to share what I think are some pretty cool organizations and causes.