Entrepreneur Marie Carole St. Juste, right, with her mother Marie Carmel Etienne outside her shop in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A small-business grant from Oxfam helped St. Juste reopen her store selling cold drinks after it was destroyed in Haiti's 2010 earthquake. Photo: Toby Adamson / Oxfam

I tend to resist holidays that are construed by purveyors of greetings cards, florists, and chocolate makers. Sentimental gushes of appreciation leave me in a state of shock and awe. Why is it considered important to honor mothers on May 8 (Mother’s Day falls on this date in the US)? I looked up the historical significance of this day, and couldn’t find any substantial information that convinced me of its importance. What then is the point?

That’s why, as I researched potential gift ideas for moms from Oxfam America Unwrapped this year, it struck me that I’m not the most ideal candidate for this role.

Still, I reflected on the holiday for a few days, and threw possible ideas on the white board of my skeptical mind. Seasonally, spring is a time of renewal and rebirth, connecting directly with motherhood. Ancient cultures celebrated women for their fertility, and the environmental angle is well established. We have only to say the words “Mother Earth” and images of abundance: lush forests, and streams teeming with fish spring up.

Most vital, however, and what convinced me of the importance of this holiday, were the stark facts about women and poverty:

Read the rest of this entry »

To get the full story of President Obama’s recent visit to my home city, Mumbai, I knew at once to call a reliable source on the ground—my mom.  She exclaimed that taxi drivers and families eager to celebrate Diwali, the Indian festival of lights, were bemoaning the restrictions on the roads due to strict security measures in this city of over 21 million.

Despite those grumblings, Obama received a warm welcome on his three day visit, and several news reports lauded the special friendship between Obama and India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. This friendship is certainly to be lauded because of the mutual benefit it could have for two of the world’s largest democracies in terms of security and growth.

However, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that India continues to face severe challenges posed by widespread poverty and unequal access to limited resources: A third of the world’s poorest people live in India, for example, and half of its children are malnourished.

Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Zeenat Potia / Oxfam America

My initial impression of the village of Sirakoro, Mali, was an explosion of color. The women were dressed in bold prints, often with twirled head scarves, and yet their dazzling outfits contrasted sharply with the mud brown backdrop of their village. On the surface level, to my untrained eye, the poverty in Mali was different from the stark, in-your-face urban poverty that I grew up around in Mumbai, India. Here the struggles seemed subtle to a visitor, but were equally if not harsher. No running water or electricity, scarcity of food, and lack of adequate schools—to name a few.

I traveled to Mali recently to attend a conference on Saving for Change, Oxfam’s innovative microfinance program that empowers women through small, rural, community-based autonomous savings and lending groups. Saving for Change is now reaching 300,000 women, in almost half of the 10,000 villages in Mali. We went to six different remote villages and had the opportunity to see the savings groups conduct their meetings, and to talk with individual members about their experiences.

Despite President Obama’s assertion last week in his speech during the Millennium Development Goals Summit that the delivery of medicines to Mali is improving the health systems there, the UNDP statistics on Mali continue to be humbling. The overall illiteracy rate is 73.8 percent, with women faring much worse, and the average life expectancy is 48.1 years.

Yet, here we were witnessing change in difficult circumstances. The savings groups are comprised of about twenty women, and they sit around a circle conducting their business orally, often repeating the amount that each woman contributes, since no written records exist.

Read the rest of this entry »

The year before I came to graduate school in the United States, I taught English and Social Studies at my old high school in Bombay. On the first day of teacher training, our impassioned headmistress Ms. Shirin Darasha, opened with, “There are three things you need to know about being a teacher. I want you to remember these every day as we start the new school year: Encourage, encourage, encourage.”

CHANGE alumni reunited in Boston earlier this month. Photo by: Cheryl Colombo/Oxfam America.

To encourage means to impart courage; to embolden; to give support to; and to foster. Oxfam America’s youth leadership program, the CHANGE Initiative, lives and breathes this value. You can see it in the faces of the 50 or so college students who come to Boston every summer for leadership and advocacy training, which prepares them to promote social change on a local and global level. They are scrubbed full of hope and excitement, and their energy to make a difference is palpable in how they respond to and engage with Oxfam staff during the week-long intensive training. To date, CHANGE has trained nearly 550 students from over 200 campuses.

Read the rest of this entry »

During my first year in book publishing, I would often balk at parties when people asked, “What do you do? Are you an editor?” I had to begin by explaining that working with authors and booksellers to bring a book to market was the other half of the profession, but I did not like casting myself as a marketer because their inevitable response would be a smug, quasi-judgmental “ah.” Very quickly, I made peace with the fact that because my work involved selling books and ideas−not soap or violent video games−there was inherent meaning in what I did.

Now, I work as a press officer for branding at Oxfam America, where, given our mission, marketing is still sometimes a dirty word. Which brings me to Nick Kristof’s assertion in a recent column: that toothpaste sellers do a better job of peddling their wares than non-profits do, even in situations of urgent need.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sahera begins her morning duties as a rag-picker in Lucknow, India, where Oxfam funds a school and health programs for working children. According to Peter Singer, kids—in India and elsewhere—are one of the groups most at risk from poverty-related diseases. Photo: Tom Pietrasik / Oxfam

When I visited my hometown of Bombay, India, last month, I found myself trapped in complex moral dilemmas, even as I went through the motions of everyday life. There, the urban poor live smashed up against a growing affluent class. Despair, hunger, and homelessness rest uneasily side-by-side with designer boutiques and Western-inspired malls.

I remember tightly clutching my ice cream cone on a crowded commuter train, the sticky cream melting down my wrist in the midday heat. But how could I eat it when a little boy stared at me, wide-eyed, hungry, and begging for spare change?

Back home in Boston, I attended a reading last week by the author Peter Singer. Singer, the renowned and prolific Princeton bioethicist, has championed animal rights and written passionately about the ethics of giving. His new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, posits the moral argument that each one of us has the power to make a difference in the fight against poverty.

Read the rest of this entry »

Right on the verge of the holiday gorging season, I’ve gotten a glimpse of what it means to be hungry.

It all began with a knee injury earlier this year. Deprived of my usual stress busters–running and yoga—I took to filling that extra time with food. So a few weeks ago, I decided to embark on a “cleanse.” Based on a book called If the Buddha Came to Dinner, the cleanse prescribed a restricted diet as a means of transformational nourishment: renewed energy; healthy eating; and clarity of mind, body, and spirit.

No matter how much and how often I ate, the first five days—when you can eat only fruit and vegetables—were tough. Caffeine withdrawal gave me headaches and nausea. Instead of my old friends, sugar and wheat, I had to turn to kale and beets. My dreams of chocolate croissants remained unfulfilled. Slowly, I began to get into the groove, but I was always hungry.

One Sunday, on a walk through the vast, tree-filled Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, I came upon a couple sitting on a blanket unwrapping sandwiches. My heart skipped a beat: Was that bread? Indeed, I saw olive bread glistening in the sun. Bits of juicy avocado. Potato chips…

Read the rest of this entry »