Trains in Tokyo paused. Sirens sounded. And children across the country quietly lit their paper lanterns.

These are just some of the ways Japan marked the anniversary of the 9.0 earthquake that set off a massive tsunami and nuclear disaster a year ago this Sunday.

Sunday marked the one-year anniversary of the Japan earthquake and tsunami. Photo: Reuters/YOMIURI, courtesy Trust.org - AlertNet.

When reading about the anniversary this weekend, I stumbled upon a poignant photo gallery from The Guardian. One picture—a 7-year-old girl walking through the rubble where her house used to stand—really stuck with me.

I wondered what my own daughter would think in that moment. What would she ask me? What would I say?

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Gas flare at an oil rig in north east Ecuador. Photo by Coco Laso/Oxfam America

The case of Aguinda vs. Texaco in Ecuador is back in the news:  The plaintiffs won an appeal and now have the right to seize the assets of Chevron-Texaco anywhere in the world. It’s another stunning legal victory for the farmers and indigenous people of Ecuador’s Oriente who have been fighting this case in the courts in the US and Ecuador since 1993. However the defendant, the second-largest US oil company, is expected to appeal to a higher court in Ecuador.

Oxfam has been supporting the efforts of the plaintiffs in Ecuador off and on since 1991.

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Small-scale miners look for gold near Romtom. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America

If you go to a meeting in the community of Romtom, don’t be surprised if you hear some contradictory information about the effects of industrial mining on the indigenous Kuoy people here.

A foreign-owned company is moving in to mine iron ore on nearly a thousand square kilometers of land, and taking up community-held land used for growing rice, as well as small-scale gold mining. The Kuoy people here are also concerned about the loss of forest land. The “spirit forest” is an integral part of their culture as well as an area where they gather nuts, fruit, and other products they can sell.

“So far we’ve had some issues between the company and community,” says So Sea, the commune chief and an ethnic Khmer. “But these have been resolved. Presently there are no problems.”

One minute later Ouk Kong, one of the elders of the Kuoy village here paints a different picture. “One area where we used to pan for gold has been lost to the company, and in another area we can’t plant rice anymore. It’s making life very difficult here.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ines Santizo. Photo by Anna Fawcus/Oxfam America

When Ines Santizo was a young girl her mother woke her up on the middle of the night and told her to get out of the house: Her stepfather was coming home in a drunk and violent state. Before Ines could escape, her stepfather kicked her in the face and broke her nose. “My mother thought I was going to die, there was so much blood,” Ines said. “I swore right then that I would never allow a man to treat me like that again.” Read the rest of this entry »

We’re just launching a new video called “Spirit of the forest” that features Chanthy Dam, a woman I met in northern Cambodia last September who is doing courageous work helping indigenous communities protect their land rights. Chanthy and many others in Ratanakiri province survived some of the most tumultuous decades in the 20th century in her country, so I asked her a lot of questions about her experience growing up there. In this post I want to share some of her personal story that did not make it in to the video or the magazine article coming out this week, they serve to round out the story of her life and her struggles:

Growing up in Ratanakiri

Chanthy grew up in a community called Andoung Meas, which means “Golden Well” in the local language.
“There are no words that can describe my childhood…I was so poor. My parents were farmers, they hardly earned enough to eat. My family was too poor and illiterate.
“The most delicious food we had was cassava leaves, my mother put them in a pot of boiling water with a lot of salt. It was our most delicious meal. The most delicious desert was ripe bananas, we put them in a hollow bamboo and cooked it. On special occasions my father would get a civet cat, we would grill it in bamboo like that.
“I saw people reading, and I asked if I could look at what they were reading…I wanted to read those letters. I looked at them and did not understand anything. I was maybe 12 or 13 at the time. I decided to teach myself to read, and I started to read to myself. But I could not write. I dropped it because we were so hungry, and I just had no time.
“In the late 70s Vietnamese soldiers were in the province, and they were growing cassava and sweet potatoes…we were struggling and did not have food and I did not understand why they had so much food… So I went in to their fields to steal some and they caught me and told me I should have just asked and they would have given me some. I realized it was bad to steal. And I told myself that when I grow up I would have a big farm and grow a lot of things and not be hungry.

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The Amazon Defense Front's Attorney Pablo Fajardo says the case against Chevron is about the basic human right to live in a healthy environment. Photo by Coco Laso/Oxfam America.

Some big news out of Ecuador this week: A judge in Nueva Loja (also known as Lago Agrio, or “bitter lake”) issued a guilty verdict against Chevron and is fining the company $8.6 billion for polluting this fragile northeastern region of the country for more than 20 years. Media reports say this is the biggest judgment ever against any company for an environmental case.
Those of us following the case are glad to see that justice can be achieved by the people of the Amazon against one of the most powerful companies in the world – but it’s also clear from the history of this case that Chevron will do whatever it takes to avoid paying a single penny to the people who have suffered for decades. The struggle is not over. Read the rest of this entry »

Sap Lan grows rice in her village Lalai, in Ratanakiri, Cambodia. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America

In Cambodia’s northern-most province of Ratanakiri, Sap Lan shows visitors her rice field. The indigenous Kavet woman says that normally by this time of September the plants are up to her waist. Late rainfall this year means her rice plants barely reach her ankle. She is counting on harvesting wild fruits and vegetables from the surrounding forest for food and to earn money to buy rice.

Indigenous people in this province like Sap Lan depend heavily on nature, especially rain and forest resources.  Their community forest is thick with huge, magnificent trees, some as wide as five people joining hands in a circle. They soar into the sky. It is dark in the late afternoon in the woods, and when you break out into the rich light of the rice field, the bright green shocks your eyes.

There are 11 people in 29-year-old Lap’s extended family; all living in one small house near their 2.5-acre rice field. Last year they made up for a dry growing season and a shortfall in rice production by gathering the fruit from samrong trees. In some places people can pay $10 for a kilo of samrong fruit. The family earned enough to buy a motorcycle and fix up their house.

The struggle for survival here may become even more challenging: The family is hearing that a mining company is exploring for minerals in the area and that the company has a 20,500-acre concession from the government, granted without consultation or permission from the local people in the village of Lalai, on the edge of a large stream flowing into the Se San river, a tributary of the mighty Mekong.

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Hanging bridge over the Rio Chixoy. Photo by James Rodtiguez/Oxfam America

From the hills above the Rio Chixoy, Guatemala, it’s hard to even tell there is a bridge across the river, but it is really there.  Getting closer to it confirms its existence: It consists of 12 half-inch steel wires stretched across nearly one thousand feet between the high river banks, with wood slats wired unevenly into place. The entire thing wobbles back and forth, and bounces up and down, so as to make it hard to fit your feet firmly on the wood treads.

You don’t want to look down when walking on a hanging bridge such as this, but you have to in order to ensure your feet don’t just fall between the slats and into the clear space between the wires.

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Today Danish artists Soren Nielsen, Morten Moller and Mikael Plougstrup Nielsen have been sculpting two huge statues of two Maasai warriors — a  man and a woman holding a baby — out of ice just outside the Bella Center (the venue of the climate talks). The statues, carved on behalf of Oxfam, will melt away over the next two days, just in time for the end of the first week of international climate treaty negotiations.

The process is meant to symbolize the precarious situation of the Maasai tribes of Kenya, which are being hit hard by changes to the climate. One of the worst droughts in living memory has devastated the Maasai’s herds of cattle, and their livelihoods.

Each ice block is about 3 feet (or 1 meter exactly) tall and wide, and come from a river in Sweden. After being stacked three blocks high, the sculptors set to work with chainsaws and enormous chisel-like tools, expecting the entire process to take about 12 hours.

The process might go on a bit longer, however, because the pounding and roaring of the saws and tools was leaking through to meetings underway inside the conference center, forcing the staff to halt the artistic proceedings.

Eventually a compromise was worked out, and the carvers have been able to set to work periodically (presumably when the nearest rooms were not being used).

An activist in Ghana shows a copy of the 2006 Minerals and Mining Act, which allows citizens the right to fair, adequate, and prompt compensation if their land is seized for the purposes of mining. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America

Today is International Human Rights Day, when we consider for a moment the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This was adopted by the UN in 1948, and established basic rights as universal, a key concept for the world as it moved into a crucial period of post-war rebuilding, Cold War, and decolonization. It is a relatively brief document (as human rights instruments go), just 30 Articles. In the preamble it calls on the member nations of the UN to take “progressive measures…to secure their universal and effective recognition and acceptance.”

I looked around on our web site for examples of people who are claiming and defending their rights, to serve as examples of why basic human rights are still essential to fighting poverty 61 years later. Here are just three:

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