Yasmin washes dishes in the derelict restaurant room in which she and her extended family now live in Lebanon. Photo by Sam Tarling/Oxfam

In honor of World Refugee Day on June 20, this week we will be sharing a series of blog posts highlighting the stories of refugees from Syria, where an escalating crisis has forced millions to flee their homes.

“Have you been to Syria?” asks a woman who gives her name only as Yasmin. It’s not her real name. She is too afraid to share that one—afraid of what will happen when she and her family return from their exile in Lebanon to Syria, a Syria she may no longer recognize.

Yasmin’s longing for that place—and all that’s been lost—makes me catch my breath as I read her words.

“We lived in a lovely old town,” she continues. “It had a big vegetable market where you could always get lots of fresh vegetables. It had many historical buildings. They were so beautiful. Now they have all gone and you won’t have a chance to see them. It was bombed one year and two months ago.”

I picture the terrible waste, the history that’s now a heap of rubble. I imagine being the mother of young children—as Yasmin is—and the terror they lived with as the bombs fell. When their house was hit, they fled to Damascus. When the bombing started there, too, they left for Lebanon and the dark, damp room that now houses eight of them. There is no running water. Their room serves as kitchen, bedroom, living room, toilet. Read the rest of this entry »

This blog post by acclaimed chef Mary Sue Milliken originally appeared on Civil Eats. A dedicated Oxfam supporter, Milliken also contributed a recipe to the new issue of OxfamCloseup, our member magazine.

Mary Sue Milliken, pictured at an Oxfam event in 2012, is the co-chef/owner of Border Grill Restaurants in Los Angeles. Photo: Ilene Perlman/Oxfam America

It’s no surprise that the Mayans kept chocolate a secret for so long. There are few foods that illicit the kind of response chocolate does, whether it takes the form of a candy bar, a moist cake, or a warm brownie. I love creating decadent chocolate desserts, especially “Hidden Kisses”:  unevenly broken chunks of dark, rich chocolate wrapped in buttery, crisp shortbread.  They work some real magic on just about everyone.

As a chef, I am always on a quest for the best ingredients. When it comes to chocolate, I have tried it from near and far; some made with cocoa from Ecuador, others from Mexico or Ghana. What a luxury it is to have all these delicious and versatile chocolates at our fingertips.

Recently, as I was preparing my “hidden kisses” and nibbling on an intensely fruity Madagascar chocolate, I got to wondering – who is growing the magical cacao fruit that became this powerfully delicious chocolate?  Because of my work with Oxfam, I have become aware of the injustices in our global food system.  And although I love my chocolate, I hate injustice. (Civil Eats has reported previously on this issue here and here.)

As it turns out, most cocoa farmers and workers who are key to our delicious chocolate delights live below the poverty line, earning less than $2 a day. Worse yet, many cocoa-growing areas have high rates of hunger and malnutrition. Women play an indispensable role in the quality of cocoa in many countries, but it is usually men who sell the crops to traders and control the cash received as payment.

In West Africa, where most of the world’s cocoa comes from, women do nearly half of the labor on cocoa farms but own just a quarter of the land. Women often have fewer economic opportunities and, as workers, are often paid less than men. Cocoa farmers in Nigeria told Oxfam that women are paid $2 to $3 for a day’s work, while men earn about $7 a day.

The enormous demand for chocolate has drawn millions of women into employment as farm workers in poor countries.  Although this is great for fueling growth, their toil is not lifting them or their families out of poverty.  Women face inequality, unfair pay and hunger in cocoa supply chains all over the world. These not so sweet facts about cocoa are taking the richness and flavor right out of my chocolate.

As consumers, we are directly connected to the farmers that grow the crops we count on and the companies that bring us our favorite products.  Each of our actions can affect countless people.  While it may seem that we can’t change any of this injustice, the fact is we can.

Read the rest of this entry »

Women pounding millet in Kalbiron, in eastern Senegal. Photo by Brett Eloff/Oxfam America.

Eastern Senegal is hot and dusty in May. The wind swirls into spiraling dust devils, stirring up the dirt and dead leaves, whirling drunkenly through the bush before disappearing up into the clear, cloudless blue sky. The inescapable heat feels like opening up a hot oven, when the heat blasts into your face. Except it’s like that all day, and you can’t ever close the oven door.

In Tambacounda, at a small village called Kalbiron, farmers are nervously awaiting the rains, preparing their fields, and thinking about the growing season. After they amass their savings, borrow money, and plant the seeds they saved from the last harvest, few will have much left over to get them through the growing months. Read the rest of this entry »

Girls collect water from a tap in Zaatari camp, Jordan. Photo: Caroline Gluck/Oxfam

By Matt Herrick, director of media and public relations at Oxfam America.

“Syria, my beloved country, will I ever return to you?” –Reema, a child refugee from Syria

Maybe it’s because my neighbors see the wreckage in Syria as generic flotsam—just some shapeless stuff forced to the surface of their attention, somehow connected to the general instability sweeping parts of the Middle East since the Arab Spring uprisings.

Maybe my friends missed the news about a massacre of children, women and men in the Syrian village of Baniyas a few weeks ago, its images so graphic that most media outlets retreated to banal prose to illustrate yet another terrible chapter in the Syrian conflict.

None of my relatives read The Atlantic magazine’s story of Syrian girls as young as 10 sold into marriage by their families, and called to say, “OK. I understand. How can I help?”

In fact, not many people have called at all.

Today, Los Angeles Times foreign affairs reporter Paul Richter wrote about the flat-lining fundraising around the crisis unfolding in Syria—funds that would otherwise go directly to delivering life-saving aid to refugee families. Now the world’s largest humanitarian disaster, lack of interest from Americans …

… reflects the murky nature of the Syrian war. It also serves as a rough gauge of public sentiment on a crisis that has frustrated the Obama administration for more than two years. … The reasons for the public’s reserved attitude are clear. Syria’s civil war involves multiple armed groups, none of which appears entirely sympathetic in American eyes.

In today’s Ottawa Citizen, in an article titled No one cares about Syria, columnist Terry Glavin tried to drive home the scale of this emergency, and concluded the following:

As a humanitarian crisis, Syria is worse than the Kosovo War of the late 1990s and the Haiti earthquake of 2010 combined.

A few weeks ago, I sat across from Ray Offenheiser, president of my own organization and a man with decades in development and relief work, as he spoke to a Foreign Policy magazine reporter about the scale of need. He dropped two candid thoughts on Cable blogger John Hudson: Syria’s crisis, in terms of scale of need, is one of the largest he’s ever seen; and humanitarian organizations including Oxfam cannot raise money to deliver aid to a growing number of Syrian refugees who need it. These people in need are mostly kids, he said.

Kids.

I have one. He’s 3 years old. He is home with my wife, his mother.

Brutalized, displaced and denied a future, the plight of Syrian children is a non-story, especially in the American media. More than half of all refugees are children. Many of the dead—which the UN today reported number 93,000—are kids or their mothers, those who were unable to flee across the border into neighboring countries to seek refuge. Others may succumb to diarrheal diseases without access to safe, clean water.

Syrians are suffering terribly and they need your help. What’s happening in Syria and surrounding countries is a humanitarian disaster of staggering proportions, and Syria’s children are bearing a disproportionate burden in this violent conflict.

Oxfam is working today to protect families who have fled their homes from the risks and indignities of displacement. We are providing access to shelter, food, water, and sanitation – critical aid that is in dangerously short supply.

You, too, can help these children and their families by donating now.

It’s not confusing. It’s not murky. It’s crystal clear: Syrians need our help.

Maysa Abdel Razaq al Akhras and her children sit in the dilapidated apartment that is now their home in Lebanon. Photo by Sam Tarling/Oxfam

When the UN launches the biggest humanitarian appeal in its history— as it did today for $5 billion—it’s hard to ignore the urgency behind the record-breaking number.

For countless Syrians, who have endured two years of brutal conflict, that urgency is a daily reality. With their homes bombed and their jobs gone, where will they live? How will they get food, water, medicine?

“We are witnessing the daily human wreckage of a country tearing itself apart,” said Jane Cocking, Oxfam’s humanitarian director. “This is the world’s most pressing humanitarian crisis. The scale is staggering and getting worse.”

The UN estimates that more than 1.6 million refugees have now fled Syria to seek safety in neighboring countries. They have arrived with virtually nothing and face huge obstacles in meeting the needs of their families. Inside Syria, an estimated 4.25 million people have been displaced.

“Our house was bombed. It’s all gone. Nothing left,” said a woman who is too afraid to offer her name. She is now living in a small room—about 8 feet by 20 feet—inside an unused restaurant in Lebanon. Seven other members of her extended family are crowded into the dark, damp room with her. There is no running water. And the family can only afford to eat one decent meal a day, with whatever is left-over providing meager fixings for a second.

“Is no one in America, Europe watching the news? Are they not seeing what is happening to us?” she asked. Read the rest of this entry »

In a crisis as complex and humanly devastating as Syria’s, numbers tell only part of the story:  Of the estimated 1.5 million people who have fled the country, more than half are children. That’s more than 750,000 young refugees from one place.

It’s a number that shocks for a fleeting moment—until it’s bumped aside by the next: 4.25 million people displaced inside Syria.  And the next : 6.8 million within the country in urgent need of assistance.

The enormity of these numbers obscures the reality behind them. They are crisis stats, a tidy way to help categorize an emergency and park it in a part of your consciousness where you can be aware of it, but not deeply bothered by it—until you hear the words of Reema, a young Syrian poet and refugee, read in the audio slideshow above by Natasha Milet-Carty, a young American school girl.

Reema, who is afraid to reveal her true identity, speaks for every child wrenched from the security of home and confronted by unbearable destruction. And in Natasha’s narration, you hear the longing and loss of that generation. The fighting has destroyed Reema’s house, her school, her dreams, she says.

But one thing it can’t kill is love.

“All I want is to live in my country in freedom,” writes Reema. “Syria, my beloved country, I love you.”

Learn more about how Oxfam is helping Syrian refugees and donate now to support these efforts. Read the rest of this entry »

1. There’s a crisis within a crisis.

Refugees from Syria living in Zaatari camp in Jordan. The camp now houses about 100,000 people. Photo: Caroline Gluck/Oxfam

Many of the stories we’re hearing about the war in Syria actually overlook a fast-growing emergency: millions of ordinary Syrians have had to leave their homes to escape the fighting. In many cases, families had to leave home with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and now struggle to obtain basics like food, water, shelter, and medical care.

2. More than five million people have had to flee their homes.

Refugees reach Jordan after having just walked across the border from Syria. Photo: Anastasia Taylor-Lind/Oxfam

Most of these five million displaced families remain in Syria, where nearly a third of the population is in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. However, more than 1.5 million refugees have fled across borders to neighboring countries like Jordan and Lebanon. (To put it in perspective, that’s roughly the same as if every woman, man, and child in the state of New Hampshire had to leave home and take refuge in Massachusetts and Vermont.)  The UN predicts that the number of refugees could rise to three million by the end of 2013.

3. At least half of the refugees are kids.

Children from two families who were neighbors in Syria before they fled the war in February. They now live in a makeshift shelter in Lebanon. Photo: Sam Tarling/Oxfam

UNICEF estimates that at least 50 percent of the refugees from Syria are children under 18. Many had to drop out of school, like Reema, a bright 12-year-old whose home was destroyed by an air strike. Her family now lives in a small, windowless shelter in Lebanon. “I was at school when it was bombed. Some of the children were killed … We left because we were afraid of the bombings in Syria,” Reema said. (Read some of the poems Reema wrote about her experiences.)

4. Most refugees are not living in camps.

Judi and Mohammed Yousef in their family’s temporary home: an abandoned shopping center in Lebanon. Photo: Sam Tarling/Oxfam

While Jordan’s Zaatari camp is now home to more than 100,000 refugees from Syria, 70 percent of the refugees in Jordan are living in urban communities. In Lebanon, there are no camps in place for refugees, so families are scattered among 1,200 different locations—like the abandoned shopping center near Tripoli, pictured above, where 90 Syrian families have built makeshift homes in bare tiled rooms that used to be stores. Read the rest of this entry »

On your “live an amazing life” bucket list I highly recommend adding “take the boat taxi across Lake Kivu from Goma to Bukavu.” It’s a high-speed dart across a beautiful and nearly pristine body of water shared with traditional fishing boats and bounded by Rwanda on one side and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on the other. You’ll skim along the water in a boat that rides so low that you’ll actually be partially underwater for the sensational ride.

But before you go you should read this week’s story called “A Day in the DRC” by Armin Rosen at The Atlantic. Full disclosure: Oxfam helped fund his trip to Goma and environs to report on what he saw. Full disclosure: When we asked him to go, I didn’t care at all what he wound up writing. Full disclosure: he’s a damn good writer and you should hear his take on a region that has seen unspeakable crimes, still sees them, and yet still lives.

“I set out with James [a local tour guide] … to see things that had no overt connection to the eastern Congo’s many tragedies; to gather evidence that life here is more than just displacement and conflict, even in a city this battered, ” writes Rosen.

Children collect water from lake Kivu, near Goma, in late 2012. Photo: Kate Holt/Oxfam

“Even in war, people try to live their ordinary lives,” James tells him at one point. “It’s a reflection of the Congolese people. Even if you go to a death ceremony, people will cry. And then they start to relax – to laugh, to sing.”

The whole piece goes on like that. Really, it’s a great read.

Rosen’s story is the first I have read (and probably you too) that includes mention of a cobbled-together foosball table or teenagers breakdancing on the floor of a former church. These images are, really, the whole point of asking a great writer if he’d be interested in spending some time in an amazing place and telling readers about it.

You see, I’d argue that there’s quite an appetite, especially within the US media, for the stories about a brutal Africa. For the Africa of wars and child soldiers. For poverty and militias. Fascinating, necessary, stories all, and we need them to be told. And goodness knows that had some of these stories been told 10 or 20 years ago in this very place, some of the tragedies that people experienced might have been avoided. But we also need the foosball stories, the breakdancing stories, and the everyday life-in-the-world stories.

This is the Goma that I know. It is a place filled with people dealing with a sometimes brutal history, an too-often brutal present, and figuring out the best place to breakdance or kill a few hours playing foosball. It’s sticking your hand out the window of a boat, dragging your hand across the water, and marveling at one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

OxfamBuzzList is a blog series about the movies, books, articles, music, and more that have Oxfam staff and supporters talking. We welcome guest contributions.

Right now the American Petroleum Institute is waging a legal battle in Washington to block key sections of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act– passed by Congress and signed by President Obama– that requires oil companies to divulge what they pay governments.

Some of the same companies supporting the suit, like Chevron, are also say they support the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative, which is meeting in Sydney this week to promote more disclosure of oil, gas, and mineral resource revenues.

Chevron’s page on the EITI web site says “Chevron believes that the disclosure of revenues received by governments and payments made by extractive industries to governments could lead to improved governance in resource-rich countries. The transparent and accurate accounting of these funds contributes to stable, long-term investment climates, economic growth and the well-being of communities… Our commitment to promoting revenue transparency in (sic) reflected in our participation in the multistakeholder Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Chevron, which continues to support the efforts of the Oslo-based EITI Secretariat, was elected to serve as a full member of the EITI board in 2009.”

OK so we are asking: Does Chevron support resource revenue transparency or not, and if so why has the company not publicly disavowed its support of the API law suit?

Right now we are calling on Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell to drop their support of the API suit. You can help: Check out our new video, share it through your social networks, and take the action to call on Big Oil companies to be honest, support resource revenue transparency, and drop the law suit in Washington.

Emelia Amoateng speaking to a delegation from Oxfam America in the church in her village, Teberebie. Photo by Neil Brander/Oxfam America.

The first time I met Emelia Amoateng she introduced me to the members of the Teberebie Concerned Farmers’ Association. The farmers had recently been moved off their land by the Iduapriem gold mine, and were contesting the compensation they were offered by the company. “According to our law, no one should take anything away from you by force, but that is what happened here in Teberebie,” she said to me.

Teberebie’s fields are now buried under massive piles of grey waste rock. The farmers live in modest concrete homes the company built, and have to walk long distances (15 kilometers round trip) to their new fields where they grow oil palms, cocoa, pineapples, and other crops in the rich tropical soil. They live close enough to the mining operation that their homes crack from the blasting in the mine pit, but few of the people have been able to secure employment there.

When I first went to Teberebie in 2007, Amoateng and the others in the Association were in the early stages of what has become a 10-year legal battle. With help from Oxfam’s partners the Center for Public Interest Law and the human rights and environmental group Wacam, the farmers maintained their struggle, despite having little income as the case dragged slowly through the courts.

Oxfam America’s partner Wacam trains activists in the rights protected under Ghana’s Minerals and Mining Act. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America

The case is now on the verge of being settled in court-ordered arbitration, so it is particularly tragic that Amoateng, 38, passed away earlier this month. Despite chronic asthma, she was an inspiring and dedicated leader, tirelessly defending the rights of her neighbors when innocent community members were shot by police, and documenting chemical spills so the community could get appropriate compensation for damages. When the proper authorities failed to do their duty to protect the lives, livelihoods, and property of her community, Amoateng reached out to the media and led demonstrations to call attention to the injustices being perpetrated against Teberebie. She did all this while taking classes to finish her secondary education, and raising two children.

“Our constitution says that if someone comes for your farm, they should negotiate and compensate you before they carry out a project,” she told me, showing me her copy of Ghana’s 2006 Minerals and Mining Act. Her training helped her hold the government and AngoGold Ashanti Mining company accountable for their actions.

Emelia Amoateng in 2007. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America

I found out that Emelia passed away last week when I was in Senegal, driving from the eastern region Tambacounda back to Dakar. We stopped for lunch and I took advantage of a wi-fi connection to get my email, and I read a statement from Daniel Owusu-Koranteng, one of the founders of Wacam: “Emelia Amoateng, the great warrior of Teberebie and an icon of Wacam, has gone the way of all mortals. She died carrying high the resolve of Wacam to fight against irresponsible mining.”