The Syrian refugee crisis is escalating at a breathtaking pace. In early March the UN estimated that four million people in Syria were in urgent need of assistance; by late April, the number had shot up to 6.8 million.

And more than 7,000 people are fleeing to neighboring countries every day.

But aid providers are struggling to raise funds for this emergency, and there are serious obstacles to reaching people in need within Syria.

In a new report, “Overtaken by Need,” Oxfam lays out the latest facts and figures and warns of the consequences of neglecting this human-made disaster.

Numbers only hint at what’s happening on the ground, though, so our colleagues in the region have also sent us pictures of people they’ve met—a reminder that every one of the millions affected is a human being with a story.

Like Samira (see below), a widow and mother who fled with her family to Lebanon. “We decided to come to Lebanon because of the fighting that was taking place,” she said. “We couldn’t get any food anymore, we couldn’t live our lives, we lost our jobs, and we worried that we couldn’t stay alive.”

Now she is safe from the weapons of war, but not from the elements: her family spent the frigid winter in a homemade shelter built of cinder blocks, cardboard, and plastic sheeting. And day and night she keeps a vigil. “I just can’t stop thinking about how to feed my children and how to protect them.”

Learn more about how Oxfam is helping Syrian refugees and donate now to support these efforts.

Photo: Caroline Gluck/Oxfam

Above, girls collect water from a tap stand in Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. Below, a boy plays on a street where families hang their laundry.

Zaatari is now home to more than 100,000 refugees from the conflict in Syria. According to UNICEF, half of those refugees are children.

With 2,500 to 3,000 Syrians crossing into Jordan each day, Zaatari is now equivalent in size to the fifth-largest city in Jordan. Fifty thousand people arrived in February alone. Oxfam is helping more than 20,000 refugees in the camp by installing water taps and storage towers, latrines, showers, and laundry areas.

Photo: Caroline Gluck/Oxfam

“We’re surrounded by children for most of the day. We walk together, we eat together, we share stories and dreams,” said Farah al-Basha, an Oxfam engineer working in Zaatari. “When the time comes to leave the camp … We’re thinking about how lovely a shower will be, but [then] the kids come and say ‘see you tomorrow’ and we close the doors with a big smile. … We start thinking about what can we do next for those kids.”

Learn more about how Oxfam is helping Syrian refugees and donate now to support these efforts.

Oxfam’s Elizabeth Stevens recently visited Haiti to document our work on revitalizing rice farming and reducing the risk of disasters—including outbreaks of cholera.

If I had to choose one place to sit and learn about a rural town in Haiti, I’ve decided, it would have to be the community well. In places where there is no running water, the local well has a steady stream of visitors, and everyone has a story.

Even the well has a story.

"We love the Oxfam staff here," said Jean Jose. "They've given good advice and really helped us get rid of cholera." Photo: Elizabeth Stevens/Oxfam

On a November afternoon in the town of Atchevrot, Marchand Dessalines, my Oxfam colleagues and I crossed a rickety bridge over an irrigation channel to the place where villagers were collecting water.

Jean Jose—the man who dug the well with his machete back in 1984—joined us there, and Valeus Wislor, the engineer that Oxfam hired to fix it up last year was with us, too. The concrete cover, sand filter, hand pump, and drainage channel were his work.  And gathered around the well to meet us that day were members of a team—trained by Oxfam partners from El Salvador—that is helping communities of the lower Artibonite Valley protect their water supplies from cholera bacteria and prepare for emergencies of all kinds. Read more about this program.

The team leader’s name is Philippe Merisson, and he is a middle school teacher. We learned that day that he is also a master in the Haitian martial art of stick fighting, and he told us a little about it. A stick fighter, he explained, learns to anticipate and block blows from all directions—even in the dark. Even when the stick is swapped out for a machete.

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Classmates Merline Jacques, right, and Soeurette Charles. “We’re really proud to be agricultural mechanics,” said Charles. Photo: Anna Fawcus/Oxfam America

When a massive earthquake struck Haiti in January, 2010, it shone a spotlight on the need to ease the dangerous overcrowding of the capital city of Port-au-Prince. So, after responding to the disaster with emergency programs, Oxfam shifted some of our focus to the countryside. Together with our partners, we ramped up our program to reinvigorate the rice economy of the Artibonite Valley, with the goals of reducing rural poverty, contributing to food security in Haiti, and—by making rice farming more viable—counteracting the continuous pull to migrate from the country to the city. As Oxfam’s Elizabeth Stevens reports, Haiti’s rice farmers are embracing the program and making it their own.

“Some of my women friends don’t like the idea of being in grease all day,” said Merline Jacques, a young woman I met in the town of Liancourt in the Artibonite Valley. But she doesn’t seem to mind.

Jacques is a pioneer—a woman setting out to become a professional mechanic in a country where such a thing is unheard of. She’s one of five female students in a class of forty who are taking a two-year course to learn not only mechanics but also a specialty within it: how to fix agricultural equipment.

“People have said that the Artibonite region alone could feed this whole country,” explained Chandelère Mayette, who helps run the course for an Oxfam partner. “But there’s a lack of technicians in agriculture.”

And that is costing farmers dearly. These days, getting a piece of equipment like a cultivator, rice mill, or irrigation pump fixed can take weeks, because the mechanics often have to be recruited from the Dominican Republic. A delay like that can ruin a season’s harvest, so training up young mechanics is an important part of strengthening the rice economy.

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MAFLPV founder Marie Melisma Robert (right) with members of her organization, standing in a field of rice. Oxfam has helped MAFLPV members make the transition to a high-yield growing technique. Photo: Anna Fawcus/Oxfam

When a massive earthquake struck Haiti in January, 2010, it shone a spotlight on the need to ease the dangerous overcrowding of the capital city of Port-au-Prince. So, after responding to the disaster with emergency programs, Oxfam shifted some of our focus to the countryside. Together with our partners, we ramped up our program to reinvigorate the rice economy of the Artibonite Valley, with the goals of reducing rural poverty, contributing to food security in Haiti, and—by making rice farming more viable—counteracting the continuous pull to migrate from the country to the city. As Oxfam’s Elizabeth Stevens reports in a series of blog posts, Haiti’s rice farmers are embracing the program and making it their own.

My first meeting with a women’s group in Haiti was on a pitch-black night. At first there were just a few of us sitting on a porch, our faces lit by the eerie glow of a solar lamp, but every few minutes a new arrival emerged from the darkness, and soon the crowd was spilling out into the yard.

The Mouvement d’Aide des Femmes Liancourt-Payen de la commune de Verrettes (MAFLPV) is a key partner for Oxfam in the rice-growing Artibonite Valley. It’s a women’s organization that provides its members with access to low-interest loans so they can successfully market rice and whatever other goods they want to sell.

“We used to go to loan sharks when we needed money,” said Marie Melisma Robert, the founder and president of MAFLPV. She explained that the local moneylenders charge monthly interest of 25%. “When we couldn’t pay back the loans, we were arrested.” Now the women have access to credit at three percent – which can spell the difference between a successful business and spiraling debt.

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When a massive earthquake struck Haiti in January, 2010, it shone a spotlight on the need to ease the dangerous overcrowding of the capital city of Port-au-Prince. So, after responding to the disaster with emergency programs, Oxfam shifted some of our focus to the countryside. Together with our partners, we ramped up our program to reinvigorate the rice economy of the Artibonite Valley, with the goals of reducing rural poverty, contributing to food security in Haiti, and—by making rice farming more viable—counteracting the continuous pull to migrate from the country to the city. As Oxfam’s Elizabeth Stevens reports in a series of blog posts, Haiti’s rice farmers are embracing the program and making it their own.

Oxfam and our partners have helped restore 4,700 acres of land to cultivation by clearing and repairing irrigation channels. Photo: Anna Fawcus/Oxfam

The muddy water coursing along the roadsides and through the rice fields of the Artibonite Valley plays a prominent role in the lives of rice farmers.  Rivers and channels nourish the rice, the vegetables, the goats and cows, and the riot of greenery in the countryside.  But when storms and hurricanes strike, it’s those same waterways that overflow and carry away livestock, drown the crops, contaminate wells, and deliver deadly cholera bacteria to rural communities.

If the water moves freely through the channels—unimpeded by sediment, weeds, and debris—the risks subside, and the benefits can transform communities, which is why we’ve focused resources on helping farmers clear more than 60 miles of irrigation canals.

Dubuisson is one of the towns where we’ve been working, and I visited there with an Oxfam team last month. Clearing channels isn’t all we’re up to in this area.  We and our partner have  introduced methods of improving rice yields, provided access to low-interest loans, and helped boost the vegetable harvest in the off season for rice. But here what people talked about most was what it’s meant to them to restore irrigation to fields that had gone dry.

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When a massive earthquake struck Haiti in January, 2010, it shone a spotlight on the need to ease the dangerous overcrowding in the capital city of Port-au-Prince. So, after responding to the disaster with emergency programs,  Oxfam shifted some of our focus to the countryside. Together with our partners, we ramped up our efforts to reinvigorate the rice economy of the Artibonite Valley, with the goals of reducing rural poverty, contributing to food security in Haiti, and—by making rice farming more viable —counteracting the continuous pull to migrate from the country to the city. As Oxfam’s Elizabeth Stevens reports in a series of blog posts, Haiti’s rice farmers are embracing the program and making it their own.

"If your crops fail, you become poor," said Willi Elimelec (above). "You can't send your children to school." Photo: Elizabeth Stevens/Oxfam

Here in the lush Artibonite Valley—a region that produces an abundance of rice—the farmers are poor. Undercut in the market by cheap imported rice and lacking the basic governmental supports that farmers in wealthy countries take for granted, Haiti’s small-scale rice growers can barely eke out a living.

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Some of my most vivid images of the Sahel food crisis are of hands and feet.

“The climate was better in the past," said Fatoumata Dioum, shown here in her garden in Fafacourou, Senegal. "Now, there is sometimes too much rain, sometimes not enough. We began to notice this more than ten years ago.”

When I traveled to Senegal recently to document Oxfam’s work on the crisis, I met with women farmers who lost their last harvest to erratic rains. Several times I noticed an injury to a woman’s foot or finger—usually something simple that without medical care had become so serious that it was disabling or worse: from the look of it, some would require amputation. But none of the women had any food stocks left  and, with prices on the rise, none could afford to purchase enough for her family to eat, so a visit to the doctor was out of the question.

The painful realities in West Africa are part of a bigger picture in which climate change and food price spikes are jeopardizing the lives and futures of many of the most vulnerable people around the world. A recent Oxfam research brief –”Extreme Weather, Extreme Prices” – explains how:

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Stevens recently returned from the Kolda region of Senegal which – like much of the western Sahel region of Africa – is experiencing a severe food crisis. This is the fourth of four blogs from the trip.

As photographer Holly Pickett and I traveled around the region of Kolda, Senegal, we noticed a powerful force at work in this emergency: the bond between mothers and children.

Fatoumata Dioum, the mother of two sons and two daughters, expressed the way that connection amplifies the pain of privation: “My only concern is how to buy food for my children. All the time, I’m worrying about food. When I go to bed, I worry about food. When I get up in the morning, I worry about food.”

But Holly and her camera captured something more: for many of the families caught in this crisis, the mother-child relationship also looks like one of the places where hope resides.

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The mothers I met stayed in close contact with their young children, such as here at a hygiene kit distribution. Photo: Holly Pickett/Oxfam

Read blogs about the situation in Senegal and our programs to improve access to food and help families protect their health.

Read about Oxfam’s work on the food crisis across the Sahel region.

An urgent request: Oxfam’s programs for this emergency are severely underfunded. Please help us with a donation if you can.

Stevens recently returned from the Kolda region of Senegal which – like much of the western Sahel region of Africa – is experiencing a severe food crisis. This is the third of four blogs from the trip.

Penda Balde and her husband Djibril Sylla are living in the grip of the Sahel food crisis. Their home, which they share with their children and grandchildren, is in Fafacourou, one of countless villages in Senegal where farmers lost their last harvest to the erratic rains of 2011. Their stocks of food ran out many months ago.

Residents of Fafacourou carry home hygiene kits—a collection of materials designed to help them protect their families' health. Photo: Holly Pickett/Oxfam

Which is why they welcomed a recent distribution of soap, bleach, and scrub brushes.

If you live in a place where clean drinking water and soap are everywhere, and where a case of waterborne disease is merely an inconvenience—easily treated and cured—it may be hard to wrap your mind around why people experiencing hunger and malnutrition would see hygiene activities as a matter of urgency. But for Balde, it is obvious. “If you don’t respect hygiene, you can get diarrhea. If you have diarrhea, you become weak.”

And Balde and Sylla can’t afford to be weak.

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