Latrine; £15

Tee hee hee, toilets. Tee hee hee, bottoms.
Tee hee hee, poo. Tee hee hee, wee.

right. that's out of the way now.

Imagine the look on someone's face when you both flop down, knackered, in a coffee-shop mid-flight in your Christmas shopping and your "I got so-and-so perfume", "I got such-and-such socks" conversation is derailed by you saying "I got dum-de-dum a toilet. A pit latrine actually."
I'd love to see the evesdroppers' reaction to that one! You might have to explain - maybe printing out this bit from CAFOD's catalogue might help If you decide on this gift.
If sheer badness isn't enough reason for you (and it is rather compelling for me, I have to admit), just imagine...

London...

In the 1840s, a tough-minded reformer called Edwin Chadwick dramatized the plight of the poor by publication of a large number of official reports on the state of public health in the unsanitary cities and especially in London. Chadwick's studies were followed over the next half-century by a large number of detailed, well-documented exposés, of which the most influential was the seventeen-volume Life and Labour of the People in London (1886-1903) of Charles Booth, a philanthropic Liverpool shipowner.
Epidemics of cholera, typhus, "consumption" and other undefined maladies plagued the City over at least four centuries. Edwin Chadwick, a sanitary reformer of the era, struggled with upper class apathy toward these horrible conditions. Chadwick explored sewers, questioned slum dwellers, and turned out hundreds of reports to the Commission. He experimented with the benefits of obtaining pure water from lakes and reservoirs, rather than the fetid Thames. His Public Health Act ultimately reversed the tide of death. He chastised residents of London for defying the Law of Moses, often pointing out that it "forbade even an open camp be defiled with human ordure, and expressly ordained that it should be deposited at a distance and immediately covered with soil." Prince Albert died of typhoid fever, a reminder that even the highest in society could not ignore the debased conditions of sanitation and housing in which the mass of London's population lived. Buckingham Palace was connected with the poorer districts of London by its sewers and it shared their water supply. So, the aristocracy of the new mansions of Belgravia or Regent's Park were prey to the epidemics of typhus, cholera, typhoid, and febrile influenza that swept the poorer districts.

It could be you - and if you read the article series here, you can see how much effort on some people's part it took for change to happen here - and that was in a country that HAS money and that isn't beholden to richer siblings in filthy debt. 2.4 billion people don't have access to adequate sanitation.

[CAFOD World Gifts, www.worldgifts.cafod.org.uk ]