Kenny Rae traveled to Ethiopia in March to support relief efforts for communities in the Bale zone who are struggling to overcome the East Africa drought and food crisis.

Every morning Yenee leaves her two children in the care of her sister and ventures off to collect water for her family. After walking for two hours she arrives at the spring–the only source of water for miles around.

She is not alone. In Laga Hidha, a remote district in southeast Ethiopia which hasn’t seen rain for over a year, collecting water for drinking, cooking and bathing can be an all day affair–every day. At mid-morning at the spring there can sometimes be more than 100 women, some of whom have walked for more than seven miles. She will wait patiently in line for another two hours to fill her  jerrycans. She then returns home, carrying 30 liters (66 pounds weight) of water on her back.

In some parts of Ethiopia, women like Yenee walk several miles to collect water for their families and livestock. Photo by Kenny Rae / Oxfam America.

It wasn’t always like this. Nine years ago a well equipped with a hand pump  was installed in her village which provided water for all. Twice yearly rains would replenish the open wells and ponds that provided water for livestock, for bathing and  for laundering clothes.

The hand pump has been broken for over a year, and a promise to replace it by an aid agency has yet to be fulfilled. The prolonged drought has caused the open wells and ponds to dry up, and the cattle and goats that benefited from them have been sold off or have perished. Where there was once pasture, there in now only dust. Those determined to hold on to a couple of animals for milk must venture further and further from home to find food for their animals.

In Hidha Hunda village, an elder told us that one of the few remaining cows had, the day before been taken in search of food  and water and, miles away, had collapsed from hunger. Its owner left it where it lay and returned home. In every village we visited here, and in the neighboring district of Sawena we learned of the hardships that people are dealing with.

In  Gale  village all the  livestock has been sold. Families were unable to  keep one or two animals for milk as the surrounding pasture is long depleted. No crops have been cultivated for over a year. Collecting honey used to provide additional income for the villagers but, without water and flowers, the bees are gone. Read the rest of this entry »

Kenny Rae/Oxfam America

This just came to us from Kenny Rae, a public health engineer currently working in southern Ethiopia helping to rehabilitate water systems.

“As with other pastoralist families in Dire district in Southern Ethiopia, 10-year-old Guyo Hamadi and his family are traveling with their herd of cattle in an increasingly more difficult search for water and fodder. Guyo and his father and brother will travel more than 20 kilometers (about 12 miles) to provide water for their herd, of which they have already lost one third due to the drought. Oxfam’s drought response program in Dire includes rehabilitating wells that will provide water for people and their livestock, and the delivery of water by tanker truck to meet immediate needs in outlying areas.”

Oxfam aims to reach 3 million people in the East Africa region with a variety of support including food aid, clean water, and veterinary care for animals.  We are also campaigning to change the root causes of this crisis. Find out how you can support our efforts.

Photo: Kenny Rae / Oxfam America

Oxfam humanitarian response specialist Kenny Rae is currently in Haiti working on the recovery effort. Here’s a snapshot of his experiences this Monday, April 12.

Today marks three months since the earthquake that all but destroyed this city. But for many of the families affected, it may as well be the morning after. Early this morning, on a muddy hillside named Camp Benediction, hundreds of newcomers joined the thousands of families that call this place home. For many, this place and its adjacent neighboring camps–Camp Canaan and Village de Refuges–represents their last option, far as it is from the center of Port-au-Prince,  and without any services. As many as 7,000 people now reside here, without a single toilet or access to drinking water.

Ten-year-old Luc (pictured above) arrived here yesterday with his mother and sister Ayida. His family had being living in the grounds of a school near the center of town. In order to receive students, the school requested police to evict them and hundreds of other displaced families, and so they arrived here, really with little more than the clothes on their backs.

I met with colleagues from Haven, an Irish NGO that has been working in the area and we agreed that while Haven started to build latrines, Oxfam would set up tanks to get drinking water here as soon as possible.  Our supply of bladder tanks is now depleted, so I asked my colleague Tom Mahin to chase three of these down from UNICEF. When he told me later that he’d arranged this, I realized how much I’m going to miss his support when he returns to Boston at the end of the week. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll have three 10,000 liter bladder tanks set up and filled with water by Wednesday.

Tom Mahin, in blue shirt, helps set up a tapstand with five drinking faucets, which draws clean water from an Oxfam water bladder. Photo: Kenny Rae / Oxfam America

Oxfam humanitarian response specialist Kenny Rae is currently in Haiti working on the recovery effort. Here’s his latest blog from Port-au-Prince.

Six months ago, Tom Mahin’s focus was figuring out how to improve the quality of drinking water in the Massachusetts city of Gloucester, whose 30,000 residents had been told to boil their tap water before drinking it due to high levels of harmful bacteria.

Today his task, albeit on a smaller scale, is arguably more important: For the first time since the January 12 earthquake, 340 displaced families in Impasse Fouget, Port-au-Prince, have safe drinking water, thanks to Mahin and Haitian engineer Donald St. Preux. Mahin is a drinking water specialist with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and is working as an advisor to Oxfam America in Haiti.

Because of the urgent need, we chose this spontaneous camp to be the first to receive one of the 10 bladders—they look like big rubber pillows that hold about 2,900 gallons of water—that just arrived. Until now the 1,482 people in this densely populated location close to the city center were venturing out as far as a kilometer for drinking water.

Oxfam’s job is not only to provide water, but to ensure its quality, all with the participation of the people who will be drinking it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Twelve-year-old Samuel swings a pick to build a drainage channel for his family. Photo: Kenny Rae / Oxfam America

It’s my first week back in Port-au-Prince after a respite in Boston. Last night was uncomfortable; not physically, as the tent is now packed away and I’m sharing a room in a down-at-heel hotel on a hill distantly overlooking the harbor. But listening to the rain, I knew that my conditions were luxurious compared to tens of thousands of families below in the city.

My concerns were confirmed first thing in the morning: in a small spontaneous camp in Delmas, 300 or so people had been through a miserable night. The rain had turned the dirt covering the small field into a thick layer of mud, and grassy strips at the side of the field were laid out with clothes, mattresses, even sodden cardboard boxes that had previously made up shelters.

Our intention in coming here was to set up latrines, but now other priorities seemed more pressing. Will the 400,000 square feet of plastic sheeting ordered arrive as promised next week? Distribution of this is critical to meet the shelter needs of more than a thousand families we’ve identified. Should I deploy two of the four Haitian engineers working with me to focus exclusively on drainage in camps? How would this affect the plan to set up water tanks next week, and the endless demand for toilets from neighborhoods throughout our working area? 

Read the rest of this entry »

Natalie Bergeron, a lifelong bayou resident, has been delivering mail down in Cocodrie, Louisiana, for 30 years. She knows just about everybody in the water-logged town, which was battered by wind from Hurricane Gustav and then swamped by the storm surge from Hurricane Ike. And what she knows about them—and plenty of others along the road from Bourg through Chauvin and into Cocodrie—is worrying her.

“Not only do we have poor people trying to live, we’ve lost four factories in Chauvin. One was a huge shrimp processing factory. Gustav tore it apart,” she said over the phone as she ate her lunch. It was 2 p.m., and the first occasion she’d found that day for a meal break. Things have been busy at Bayou Grace, the community services organization in Chauvin where Bergeron works, since the storms swept through, knocking out water and power supplies. Bayou Grace is one of the local organizations Oxfam America partners with.

Read the rest of this entry »

Three years ago in Biloxi, Miississippi, Oxfam America made an unusual grant following Hurricane Katrina. We gave Hands On, a group that mobilizes volunteers to undertake cleanup and rebuilding, money to purchase a mini excavator.

FEMA had claimed that it could not deliver desperately needed trailers to those who’d lost their houses until their yards were cleared of debris. Fifty Hands On volunteers were working from dawn until dusk cutting trees and moving rubble to facilitate this.  The addition of the excavator eased their work considerably, speeding the cleanup and denying FEMA an excuse for delays in delivery of the trailers.
In the days following Katrina, Oxfam America worked with Bill Stallworth, the city councilor for East Biloxi, to set up a coordination center that would serve as the focal point of those arriving to help with relief and reconstruction.

Read the rest of this entry »

The atmosphere in the Gumbo Shop, a long-established restaurant in New Orleans’ French Quarter, was celebratory. And so it should be. The city, so traumatized by Hurricane Katrina three years ago had, despite dire predictions, been spared the wrath of Hurricane Gustav, which had veered westward before making landfall. The whole city had evacuated, but now people were coming back, and getting on with their lives again.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sitting and shading ourselves from the sun on a 100-plus degree afternoon, my Oxfam colleagues and I learned from a group of local women about life on Char Shaper, the Bangla name for Snake Island. The sandy island sits in the middle of the Brahmaputra River, also called the Jamuna, which in April meanders as gently as the Charles River in Boston.

But in July, things change dramatically with this river as it fills with snow melt from the Himalayas. Families have to pack up their belongings and head to higher ground before the flood water envelops them. As many as a million people live on islands like this one. They are among the country’s poorest citizens, eking out a living by catching small river fish and planting groundnuts, chilies, and corn. Read the rest of this entry »