We see headlines about the conflict in Syria on a daily basis—but something is missing from those news stories. Most cover the violence… bombings, chemical weapons, civilian deaths. But they rarely mention the families uprooted by the conflict. For more than 1.4 million Syrians, surviving the war has meant fleeing their country. They are now homeless, living in foreign lands like Jordan and Lebanon.

Last week, National Public Radio gave us a window into the lives of Syrian refugees living in Jordan. Middle East correspondent Deborah Amos visited the Za’atari Camp, home to more than 100,000 Syrians at any given time. Oxfam’s Caroline Gluck showed NPR how Za’atari has become a city unto itself–one that no one would create if they had the choice. Oxfam is working in the camp to support refugees who need basic services like water and sanitation.

Amos’ story introduces us to Liqaa, a 26-year-old refugee living with her husband in the camp and expecting her first child. She scrapes together ingredients to make Syrian food in their camp trailer in an effort to create normalcy in their life, which has been turned completely upside down.

Listening to Liqaa’s story, you can imagine walking in her shoes. Homeless, afraid, and living in a foreign country, I think I would crave something as familiar as hometown comfort food as well. The basic things that we take for granted are the things that Liqaa and her fellow refugees are living without while also enduring the trauma of escaping (and surviving) violent conflict. Listen to the story below, and then let us know what you think.

You can meet more refugees like Liqaa by following Oxfam on Twitter and Instagram to see the latest photos from the crisis.

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

Photo: Caroline Gluck/Oxfam

In Mafraq City in northern Jordan, children and young people lit candles to show their solidarity with the people of Syria. Their vigil was organized by Oxfam’s partner, human rights organization ARDD-Legal Aid, as part of a Global Vigil for Syria to mark the two year anniversary of the conflict. Vigils in 20 countries around the world remembered more than 70,000 Syrians who lost their lives and showed their support for more than one million who have fled their homes and rely on humanitarian assistance from organizations like Oxfam for survival. Their message was one of hope that Syria will be a country of peace and safe haven where their citizens can soon return.

Oxfam’s Areeg Hegazi remembers a vigil in Moustafe Mahmoud Square in Egypt:

“As it was nearing dawn, we started to light up the candles, some of the young men and women started forming the letters ‘Syria’ in Arabic on the floor.  Syrians in the vigil were touched with the numbers of Egyptians there – and by the opportunity to mark the anniversary while they were so far away from home.  As people drove past the vigil, they shared messages of encouragement, ‘inshallaah this would be over soon’ and ‘you’ll go back and reconstruct everything again.’”

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

Nanaï Touré imitates how she covered her head when the armed groups arrived in Konna on January 10. Photo: Habibatou Gologo/Oxfam

January 10, 2013: it’s a day that Nanaï Touré*, and other residents of Konna, Mali, will never forget.

Konna is a small city near the border between northern and southern Mali, the main dividing line of the current conflict. The city was home to about 41,000 people, mostly farmers, herders, fishermen, and traders. When armed rebel groups from the north arrived in January, followed closely by the French airstrikes that were targeting them, 90 percent of the population fled the city within a day, joining hundreds of thousands of displaced Malians.

“I live in the third district of Konna near the fishing port, which was partially destroyed by an airstrike,” said Touré. “When the armed groups came  to Konna on January 10, like other inhabitants of Konna I fled by pirogue [a small, flat-bottomed boat] to the surrounding village of Diantakaye because a projectile fell on the roof of my hut.

I have three children. I grabbed the youngest to flee and had water up to my shoulders. I asked people to help my husband who is disabled. I didn’t know where my other two children were. But a week after the military intervention, we found each other again at home.”

A few weeks later, Konna’s central city market has reopened and citizens are now returning to their homes, but not without vivid memories, like Touré’s, of fleeing for their lives.

Oxfam is helping displaced people in Mali as well as refugees in Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and Niger with food, water and sanitation services, health and hygiene kits, as well as classroom construction and gender sensitization training in some areas.

Find out how you can support Oxfam’s work to help people affected by the crisis in Mali.

*Not her real name.

What must it be like to know that your community is right around the corner, but conflict keeps you from coming home to your friends and family? In Mali, that’s the situation of 240,000 people in an area the size of Texas. Oxfam is reaching out to see how we can help them.

The complexity of three letters

In humanitarian terms, an internally-displaced person (IDP) is someone who is forced from his or her home, usually due to natural disaster or conflict, and living temporarily in another area of his or her own country. That’s in contrast to a refugee, who is displaced to another country and cannot return home due to a “well-founded fear of being persecuted” for a variety of reasons (race, religion, nationality, etc). IDPs on the other hand may have the same well-founded fear, but as they have not crossed an international border cannot avail themselves of the specific rights under the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. This international law prevents them from, among many things, being “involuntarily repatriated”—they can’t be forced to go home.

I thought recently about the complexity of those three letters – IDP – while speaking with my Senegalese colleague Habibatou Gogolo, Oxfam’s media and communications coordinator in Bamako, Mali. She had just returned from an assessment trip visiting IDP communities.

A focus group with the Oxfam assessment team Sévaré in Hotel des chauffeurs, Mali. In the site known as "Hotel des chauffeurs", local authorities provide accommodation for, according to them, 587 internally displaced persons (IDPs). Photo: Habibatou Gologo/Oxfam

She joined a team of Oxfam experts in water and sanitation services, food security, and civilian protection assessing how (or if) Oxfam can be of service in Sevare, a district of Mopti, which is on the border of southern and northern Mali. In February 2012, shortly after armed groups seized northern Mali, the first people fleeing their homes sought safety in Mopti. So the IDPs in Sevare are among the longest-standing homeless families in Mali.

Habibatou visited one “official” IDP camp that receives services from humanitarian organizations. There are still challenges, like clean water shortages and overcrowded toilets, but life on this site is relatively stable and safe from an outside perspective. Aid organizations distribute food regularly and women are washing clothes as they would at home, but if you look closely, Gogolo says it’s clear that life for these families has been turned upside down.

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Last week, I had the chance to hear Amy Wilentz speak about her new book, Farewell Fred Voodoo, at Oxfam’s Boston headquarters. “Fred Voodoo” is a term that international journalists in Haiti used for the typical Haitian. When reporting a story, they would look for the Fred Voodoo quote – the average Haitian perspective on the topic at hand. It’s something like what “Joe the Plumber” became in the 2008 election.

Living in Haiti as a journalist, Ms. Wilentz experienced the small, storied Caribbean nation as an outsider. While I haven’t spent the same length of time in Haiti, my work with Oxfam brings me there frequently, and I can definitely relate. Ms. Wilentz talked about traveling around Haiti in what felt like a bubble. Trying to listen, be open, learn – to not be that all-too-typical outsider arriving with all the solutions for a “better” Haiti. In Kreyol, white people are blans, basically their version of Fred Voodoo. I’m a blan, I’m Jane American Pie.

With Farewell, Fred Voodoo, Ms. Wilentz signals the end of that era of stereotyping Haitians in journalism – and even beyond journalism to development and the overall international presence in Haiti. If the 2010 earthquake did anything positive, it showed the world who Haitians really are. The devastation, the bravery, the strength, the strife, the hunger, the vitality. Fred Voodoos they are not.

I attended Ms. Wilentz’s talk – as I think many of my colleagues did – to gain some perspective about Haiti. To get some answers to some of the most puzzling questions that plague us about how we can be of best use in Haiti, how we can help and not contribute to the complex problems there. But Ms. Wilentz didn’t come to the table with answers, or advice, or declarations. She came with questions. And her book does the same. It’s not a journalist’s job to write solutions and occasionally insert a Fred Voodoo quote. Just like it’s not my job, as an Oxfam media officer, to answer questions on the Haitian people’s behalf to my US audience.

Jane American Pie will never fully understand what will bring sustainable change to Haiti. But if I drop that label for myself, and we all say farewell to Fred Voodoo, asking the right questions of ourselves and each other will get us there.

OxfamBuzzList is a blog series about the movies, books, blogs, music, and more that have Oxfam staff and supporters talking. If you’d like to contribute a guest post or suggest a topic, please leave a comment below

Rice fields owned and farmed by the women of MAFLPV, a women’s farming collaborative in Liancourt. Photo: Maura Hart/Oxfam America

My trip to Haiti last month was my fifth since the 2010 earthquake. As a press officer, I work with journalists to report on the progress and challenges rebuilding Haiti in the last three years. This role mostly keeps me in Port-au-Prince, the hardest-hit area, where you typically see the television cameras reporting.

This time, I traveled further, to visit Oxfam’s projects in the rural farm areas of Haiti. Sixty percent of Haitians rely on farming to earn a living, and investing in agriculture is crucial for the country’s future. I felt as though I finally got the opportunity to see the part of Haiti’s character that I was missing.

It was also my first time traveling with a fancy smartphone—and more importantly, Instagram. Oh, Instagram. My photographic vocabulary is limited to point, click, and usually, delete. But Instagram makes even me look like a purposeful, artistic photographer. With a simple click, filter, and post, I gave Oxfam America’s followers a glimpse of the Haiti that they don’t normally see on CNN.

Josephat Evania, vice secretary of MAFLPV in Liancourt, in her thriving rice field. Photo: Maura Hart/Oxfam America

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An early morning view of the Lower Urubamba River from the grounds of the Sabeti Lodge in Timpia. Photo: Maura Hart / Oxfam America.

Maura Hart traveled to Peru last month to visit indigenous communities whose lands and livelihoods are affected by the Camisea natural gas pipeline project.

Traveling in a small motorboat along the Lower Urubamba River in central Peru, I felt like guest in a mythical land, though my sneakers soaked in river water reminded me that I was in fact on Earth. Surrounded by the dense forest, exotic birds flying overhead, I could glimpse small huts, and children running through the trees in the eerie quiet. There was something about this river and the land floating by that made me feel like I should have been asking some higher power for permission to visit.

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