24 October 2018
The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) has delivered 16 boxes of donated bras collected by a Kiwi charity for Vanuatu
women.
Lieutenant Commander Lorna Gray, the Commanding Officer of offshore patrol vessel HMNZS Otago, said the ship delivered
the donated goods last weekend as part of its four-month deployment to the South West Pacific, which started in August.
“It’s for a good cause and one that our Defence Force is happy to help with,” Lieutenant Commander Gray said.
Kate Hargraves, Auckland Area Coordinator of the Uplift Project, said the donated bras would be distributed to villages
in Vanuatu through the local charity Mamma’s Laef.
“While we actively collect bras, our problem can be to get these donated goods to the Pacific,” Ms Hargraves said.
“The NZDF’s assistance has been invaluable and an amazing help for us. We’re a charity, so we have no money and there’s
no way we could send this amount of donated goods commercially.”
Uplift Project, a charity that started in Australia in 2005, has distributed more than a million donated bras to central
and Western Australia, the South Pacific, South East Asia and Africa. It has sent more than 2,600 bras to Vanuatu over
the past 18 months, including about 1,000 that were delivered by Otago in July 2017.
ENDS