Elizabeth Rojas, health and nutrition program coordinator for the community organization El Mantaro Revive. "“We are concerned about children’s health in La Oroya. Many have just started to recover from high levels of lead in their blood, and what happens now will be critical for them. Always, the most vulnerable population is the poorest.” Photo: Percy Ramirez/Oxfam America

Women like Elizabeth Rojas, above, are at the heart of an effort to defend public health and the environment in La Oroya, Peru, a city that’s been called one of the most polluted places on earth. While legislators and CEOs debate whether or not to reopen the Doe Run Peru lead smelter in La Oroya, these women continue their efforts to protect the community—even when it means putting their own safety at risk. Add your support by signing the petition at http://bit.ly/HEVNZQ.

Hear more from La Oroya’s women leaders on Flickr, and help raise awareness by watching and sharing the bilingual slideshow below. (Expand the slideshow and select “show info,” upper right, to read their testimonials in English and Spanish.)

La Oroya, Peru, in 2006, when the Doe Run Peru lead smelter was operating in the center of town. Photo: Flor Ruiz / Oxfam America

“Communication is power,” said Rosa Amaro. “I would like people around the world to know what’s going on in my town, La Oroya … and then our authorities here in Peru can respond to the problems.”

Amaro told me this when I spoke with her in Boston last fall. But I didn’t really understand what the Oxfam partner and community leader meant until I visited Peru last week, during a crucial moment in her and other residents’ effort to protect their community. For ten years, they’ve been calling on the Doe Run Peru Corporation (part of the American-owned Renco Group) to clean up operations at its giant lead smelter in the heart of their town. Toxic chemicals from the smelter have affected La Oroya’s air, water, and soil, and contributed to health problems like elevated blood lead levels in local children.

Now, Peruvian authorities are debating whether or not to extend the deadline for Doe Run Peru to improve its environmental standards in La Oroya. If they do, the smelter—which has been closed for the last two years—could reopen as early as May, with no guarantees of a cleaner operation.

Many of the activists from La Oroya have a child or other family member whose health has been affected by lead poisoning. Most are women. Organized into grassroots networks, they help one another. And while they don’t have the money or influence of a major corporation, they do have the ability to reach others and mobilize them to join the cause.

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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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Telley Madina, Oxfam America’s coastal communities program officer, just returned from Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, where he visited with Oxfam America’s partner organization Zion Travelers Cooperative Center (ZTCC).

Reverend Tyrone Edwards, Founding Executive Director of ZTCC, is a lifelong community organizer and a tireless advocate for coastal communities affected by hurricanes and last year’s BP oil spill. Edwards often says that if coastal erosion and the emission of gas and other toxins are allowed to continue, our children’s future will be robbed. That’s one reason that his organization started a program to educate and involve Louisiana youth in coastal restoration, hurricane protection, and the broader environmental movement.

Rose Butler of the Bayou Rebirth Wetlands Education Program shows children from Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana how to do water quality tests. Photo by: Rev. Tyrone Edwards / Zion Travelers Cooperative Center.

I saw firsthand how the kids ZTTC works with feel connected to the environment. Since most of them are teenagers, they remember what Katrina did to their lives. When I visited with them, they were preparing to plant seed grass on the side of levees. This work is vital to coastal restoration because the overall objective is to rebuild land, and their work is the starting block for that to happen. The kids seem to be conscious that by fighting to protect and rebuild this land, they are protecting their very futures.  As one of the kids jokingly said, “If we don’t fix this place then we won’t live here soon.”

Participating in this work seems to build up their self-esteem as well.  One said, “Rev. Edwards is the man because he listens to us.  Our opinions are important, and he wants us to back them up with work.  If we think of something to do, he’ll say let’s go do it and see what happens.”

Edwards has been doing community organizing and youth empowerment for 41 years.  He makes sure these young people have a place at the table for whatever he’s working on because he realizes that coastal restoration may not be completed in his lifetime, so he wants to make sure he can hand the mantle off to the next generation to make sure the work gets done.

These kids’ energy and capacity to understand the magnitude of what’s happening in Plaquemines Parish continues to inspire me.  Edwards would assert that he could fix Plaquemines with enough money and the kids in his program.

What would I do for a cause I believed in? Wear a pin or a t-shirt? Sure, no problem. March in the streets or shiver in a tent, a la Occupy Wall Street? Maybe—if it was something really important.

But what if speaking up endangered my life? What if my fellow activists faced threats, or even actual violence, because of our actions? Would I keep going anyway, or be scared into silence?

Big questions, but those are the kind of things I’ve been asking myself since I met Francisco Pineda last week.

Pineda, an Oxfam America partner and recent winner of the prestigious Goldman Prize, led a citizens’ movement to protect El Salvador’s land and water from the harmful effects of a gold mine. He’s one of six Goldman Prize winners featured in a documentary called The New Environmentalists, narrated by Robert Redford and premiering starting Sunday on PBS stations around the country. “The new environmentalists are making personal sacrifices that most of us can’t even imagine,” says Redford in the trailer, below.

In Pineda’s case, that’s definitely true. Though he comes across in person as an unassuming guy, the story he told when I interviewed him was pretty shocking: A community’s only source of clean water being pumped away by a gold mine. A mining company scientist trying to convince people that cyanide isn’t poison. A leader living with 24-hour police protection because of repeated attempts on his life—and mourning his friends and fellow activists who’ve been killed for speaking out. Read the rest of this entry »

Women sign their names in support of Oxfam’s food justice campaign, GROW, at a World Food Day event yesterday in Sri Lanka. Photo: Sandun Thudugala/Oxfam

Sri Lanka is the latest country to join Oxfam’s global efforts around World Food Day. Oxfam’s Sandun Thudugala sent us this update about a World Food Day event yesterday in Colombo, which brought together leaders from government and local communities to talk about solutions to hunger:

“This week, we celebrate World Food Day (16^th October) at a time when world is facing one of its biggest food crises in history … [and] around 4 million Sri Lankans are undernourished. This is a great challenge in Sri Lanka where expectant mothers and children [are] the most affected by malnutrition. Almost one in five children has a low birth weight and around 500,000 children under the age of 5 are reported to be underweight. Global food price increases and extreme weather events are already having an impact on vulnerable communities in the country.

In a country like Sri Lanka, this is an unacceptable situation. Being a country blessed with all the natural resources necessary for food production, Sri Lanka has the potential to build a sustainable food system that can be a model for the rest of the world.

Oxfam in Sri Lanka is working with a large number of organizations, from grassroots level to national level, to support small scale food production … [and] the rights of and access of small scale food producers to resources and services.  Oxfam’s GROW campaign will support the efforts of women, men, community groups, and the government of Sri Lanka to build … a country without hunger.”

Ian Sullivan is an online campaigner for Oxfam.

Imagine waking up one day to be told you’re about to be evicted from your home. Being told that you no longer have the right to remain on land that you’ve lived on for years. And then, if you refuse to leave, being forcibly removed by hired thugs.

Thankfully, this scary situation is one that most of us will never have to face. However, for many communities in developing countries, it’s a scandal that’s on the increase. It’s what’s known as a land grab – a land deal behind closed doors that often results in farmers being forced from their homes and families left hungry. Read the rest of this entry »

John Abdulla is a new media specialist at Oxfam America.

Ever wish you could just tweet the president that burning question about the state of our economy? Today at 2 p.m. EST is your chance; the White House will hold its first Twitter Town Hall. You can tweet your questions on the economy and jobs for President Obama by using the hashtag #AskObama and he will answer selected questions live via webcast at http://www.whitehouse.gov/live.

This is a great opportunity to directly ask the president how fighting global hunger, investing in resilience to climate change, and restoring our Gulf Coast can help create new jobs and improve our economy. Here are some suggested tweets that you can simply copy and paste into twitter or adapt as you wish:

• What investments would you support in food security and climate resilience to create millions of jobs and fight #hunger? #AskObama
• Why aren’t we investing in #ClimateChange resiliency to protect US businesses, deliver new consumers & create jobs here at home? #AskObama
• Do you agree that inclusive growth overseas helps America’s economic future by increasing markets for American goods? #AskObama
• Investing in Gulf Coast restoration will help the ecology and economy of the region recover. Are you on board? #AskObama

You can also visit us on Twitter and retweet your favorite question for the President!

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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Somewhere in Grand Isle, Louisiana, on a road so remote that our GPS thought we were now in a boat on the Gulf of Mexico, it started raining. And then it rained some more. It rained so hard that our small Oxfam film crew of myself, Shannon Hart-Reed, Sarah Livingston, and Michael Prince had to pull over. After several days and hundreds of miles shooting footage for a music video Oxfam was doing in partnership with The New Pornographers, all of us were ready to go home. We were exhausted, drenched, and hungry with nowhere to go – literally. The road ahead of us was flooded, and the road to our right was closed, by British Petroleum, which created the largest environmental disaster in US history, bungled the clean-up process, and somehow managed to dispossess the authorities of the power to manage their own beaches as evidenced by their hand-drawn cardboard “Beach Closed” sign tacked to the telephone pole behind us.

That forced pit stop was a long way from the Saturday night party where Oxfam received an Emmy for the music video. When our music outreach specialist Bob Ferguson stood up to say a few words of thanks after receiving the award he said what I think we all felt in that car in the middle of the rainstorm – and throughout the filming: the video, the award, the music and the work are all part of our effort to “raise awareness that the situation in the Gulf is far from over,” and make sure the people of the Gulf Coast, and in particular those most affected by the oil spill and Hurricane Katrina, are heard.

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