When it comes to choosing the perfect gift, there are many things to consider, especially when buying for children. Sometimes they will state a preference, or be interested in a particular brand or TV show, but sometimes, especially with younger children, there is no strong preference from the child, and you will need to seek out the perfect and most unusual gifts to find exactly the right one for them.
The best unusual gifts are those which aren’t just mass-produced, but where your purchase of the gift directly helps someone in need, so you don’t just give the toy and the gift of fun, but also the gift of a better life to the maker.
One example of a type of unusual gifts that does this is Pebble by Hathay Bunano, a company representing a group of women in rural India who make hand-crocheted toys for babies and toddlers. Hathay Bunano can be roughly translated to mean handmade, or hand knitted, and is a not-for-profit organisation aimed at allowing rural mothers to earn an income without needing to leave their families and travel to the cities to find work. The women who work for Hathay Bunano are typically mothers with young children, skilled in traditional crafts and handcrafting but very poor, who nonetheless still need money to feed, clothe and educate their children.
The women Hathay Bunano work with to create these unusual gifts are in rural India, a country where the economic divide between the city and rural areas is ever-growing, and for many the only option is to abandon their families and move to the city to work, where they can find employment enough to live a subsistence level lifestyle and send money back to support the family remaining at home, but not enough to relocate their family to the city as well.
The people in rural India are truly poor, often badly educated with limited access to basic necessities, and the problem is increasing as the best and brightest of the children in these communities abandon them, moving away to the cities. By buying unusual gifts made in these rural areas, the entire community benefits – families stay together, children receive better educations, community projects to ensure that the basic necessities such as power, clean water and housing are consistently available are funded, and the rural community becomes a living, thriving one where people can continue to live and raise their children.
These unusual gifts from Pebble by Hathay Bunano are all suitable from birth and fully CE tested, so you can purchase one knowing that it is completely safe for even the youngest of children and has been rigorously tested, and not only are you giving them a gift they will love that really stands out from the usual mass produced toys, but that it also makes a real difference to the lives of the makers and the people they love most as well.