Photo: Caroline Gluck/Oxfam

Above, girls collect water from a tap stand in Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. Below, a boy plays on a street where families hang their laundry.

Zaatari is now home to more than 100,000 refugees from the conflict in Syria. According to UNICEF, half of those refugees are children.

With 2,500 to 3,000 Syrians crossing into Jordan each day, Zaatari is now equivalent in size to the fifth-largest city in Jordan. Fifty thousand people arrived in February alone. Oxfam is helping more than 20,000 refugees in the camp by installing water taps and storage towers, latrines, showers, and laundry areas.

Photo: Caroline Gluck/Oxfam

“We’re surrounded by children for most of the day. We walk together, we eat together, we share stories and dreams,” said Farah al-Basha, an Oxfam engineer working in Zaatari. “When the time comes to leave the camp … We’re thinking about how lovely a shower will be, but [then] the kids come and say ‘see you tomorrow’ and we close the doors with a big smile. … We start thinking about what can we do next for those kids.”

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

A community of 1,367 families were uprooted from central Phnom Penh in June 2006 and forcibly relocated to open swamp land in Andong, 13 miles from the city and their livelihoods.

Why? To make way for a shopping mall that is yet to be built.

Acclaimed photographer Emma Hardy traveled to Cambodia to capture the story of this community and others, fighting to reclaim their rights to own, inhabit, and work the land they once owned. She describes what she saw in Andong slum:

“Seven years on, these families are still waiting for public services. Their latrine is an open field. Water for washing and cooking is piped in rickety plastic hoses at uncertain times of day and stored in large open earthenware jars standing in shockingly-polluted water. In the rainy seasons most makeshift homes are practically submerged in sewage water. In drier months, the stench is overwhelming. Dysentery is rife. Dengue fever and cholera are chronic. These relocated communities have not, to date, received ‘even one grain of rice in compensation.’”

Below are five photos from Hardy, some of which will be featured in a pop-up gallery exhibit in Washington, DC, from April 10^th to the 21^st. (See invite here.) The exhibit was created in support of Oxfam’s efforts to bring attention to global land grabs and was first featured in The Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine.

The pictures speak for themselves.

(1) Street view, Andong slum

(2) Woman collecting water snails for food

(3) Slum dog

(4) Sor Sat, Executive Director of the Cambodian non-profit, Action for Environment and Communities, after a long meeting

(5) Daughter of land activists at a meeting

Around the world, a rush to grab land is underway. Land the size of the California, Texas, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico combined was sold off globally in the last decade, enough to grow food for the one billion people who go hungry today.

The World Bank influences how land is bought and sold on a global scale. It has the power to step in and play a vital role in stopping land injustice.

Now, just before the World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings, encourage the World Bank to take action to halt the speed and scale of land grabbing around the world. Let them know the world is watching. Add your voice here.

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.

Photo: Percy Ramirez/Oxfam America; click to enlarge

Above, Marlith Amasifuen Ishuiza and her son Bryan Sangama at a community water tap in Aviación, a rural town of about 300 people in Peru’s northern Amazon region. With support from Oxfam, women in Aviación worked together to cultivate a traditional garden, which protects their indigenous Kichwa culture while providing an additional source of food and income for their families.

I thought of my 2012 visit to Avación when I read “The Kids Left Behind by the Boom,” a moving op-ed by journalist Marie Arana that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times. With the story of 12-year-old Henrry Ochochoque, Arana touches on many of the same issues that Oxfam’s programs in Peru seek to address: the stark inequalities between the flourishing capital city and the struggling rural villages; the environmental and human costs of out-of-control natural resource extraction; and the still-persistent discrimination that leaves many indigenous people shut out of the country’s recent economic boom.

As Arana points out, these problems affect kids first and foremost. Henrry, and many others like him, are getting “an education that will leave [them] drastically unprepared for the 21st century. … 78 percent of Peru’s indigenous children live in poverty. A third of all rural children suffer chronic malnutrition. … For Henrry, despite his A’s and sunny optimism, the Peruvian boom may as well be on the moon.”

In the face of challenges like this, it’s hard to be optimistic about the future. But for Henrry’s sake, and Bryan’s too, I hope we’ll see some changes before they grow up.

Photo: Creativos/Oxfam - click to enlarge

This week’s photo and story comes from Tjarda Muller, Oxfam communications officer in Central America.

Small-business owner Olga Alicia Pérez, pictured, lives in San Miguel Chicaj’, municipality of the department of Baja Verapaz in central Guatemala. “I make ice, jelly and fruit cocktails,” Pérez says. “Thank God, the business is doing well. My son studies and I am able to give him some money for a midday snack, or for the assignments he gets.”

Pérez is a member of an Oxfam Saving for Change group in her community, which helps her to keep her small business afloat. In Saving for Change, groups of 15 to 20 women combine their savings in a group fund. Members can borrow money from the fund to start or revive a small business, buy seeds and fertilizer for their land, or respond to an emergency. In Baja Verapaz, where 70 percent of the population lives in poverty, recurrent droughts as well as heavy rainfalls can devastate crops. Saving for Change provides an opportunity for women to lift themselves and their families out of these crisis situations.

“We fight; we struggle to save some money. This is a beautiful project. Many people in San Miguel Chicaj’ are involved now,” says Pérez.

The benefits of savings groups like these are now reaching far beyond Central America. Last week a group of international organizations, including Oxfam America, announced “50 by 2020,” an initiative to expand savings group membership globally from 6 million to 50 million by 2020.

Photo: George Osodi/Panos for Oxfam America

Comfort Adeniyi, a cocoa farmer, on her farm in Ayetoro-Ijesa in southwest Nigeria. In this portrait by photographer George Osodi, Adeniyi holds a long knife used by farmers for cracking open cocoa pods, weeding fields, and other routine tasks.

Adeniyi’s portrait also appears on Oxfam America’s new fact sheet, Women and the big business of chocolate. Ninety percent of the world’s cocoa is grown by 5.5 million smallholder farmers like Adeniyi, many of whom live below the poverty line. In West Africa, where most cocoa comes from, women do nearly half of the labor on cocoa farms but own just a quarter of the land. They have fewer economic opportunities and, as workers, typically earn less than men.

Fortunately, consumers like us can help (and we don’t even have to give up chocolate). Check out Oxfam’s Behind the Brands scorecard to learn what the world’s biggest food companies could be doing to improve their policies. Then join thousands of others and ask companies to give cocoa growers a fair deal.

When I catch the eye of the woman in the first photo below and recall the camps for displaced people I visited a few years ago in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I know why an international arms trade treaty is more important than ever. Conflict, fueled by a steady flow of poorly regulated weapons, continues to drive families from their homes in Congo—and in many other places around the world.

In November, photographer Katie Holt snapped these photos. Rebel groups in Congo’s eastern provinces had forced tens of thousands of people to flee.  Many sought safety in camps around the city of Goma. Study the pictures—the line of people lugging their belongings along the edge of the road; the plastic sheeting that serves as a home; the crowded water collection point—and you get a glimpse of what life is now like for countless Congolese.

“Chaos breeds chaos,” said Oxfam’s Humanitarian Coordinator Tariq Riebl in November. “Every day we hear of another attack against farmers as they work in the fields or traders as they go to market. There are hardly any places left that are safe from conflict and violence.”

Isn’t freedom from conflict and violence what we all want? The arms trade treaty could help pave the way.

Read my colleague Scott Stedjan’s blog on the truth about the treaty, and then write your senators and urge them to sign onto a letter to President Obama calling for his support of the treaty.

The weight of conflict

Photo: Katie Holt

People who flee conflict often escape with very few belongings. At a water point in Lac Vert Camp in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a scrap of plastic, twisted tight, helps to keep water sloshing from this jug. Oxfam has been providing aid, including water and sanitation services, to people in three camps around the city. “We can’t shout loudly enough,” said Oxfam’s Humanitarian Coordinator Tariq Riebl in November. “This violence has to end. It has caused decades of suffering and grinding poverty.”

On the move

Photo: Katie Holt/Oxfam

In 2012, insecurity displaced more than 760,000 people in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. When government troops pulled out of much of the east to focus on a rebellion by a group known as M23, the number of other rebel groups mushroomed. By late November, at least 25 of them were active across the provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu.

A rocky home

Photo: Katie Holt/Oxfam

Anchored by sharp rocks on rough ground, plastic sheets serve as shelter for Mahawe Francini and her three children in Mugunga camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Like countless other families, Francini and her children fled their home when fighting broke out between M23 rebels and Congolese government soldiers.

Clean water

Photo: Katie Holt/Oxfam

Taps in camps around the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo provided a clean supply of water in November to some of the tens of thousands of people who had fled recent fighting. But shortages of water and power in other parts of the city had left thousands of people with no option but to pull water directly from a nearby lake, heightening concern about the potential spread of waterborne diseases.

Photo: Luca Sola/Oxfam

Samira, pictured above in a camp for displaced people in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, is a refugee from the ongoing conflict in Syria.

Samira is living in a self-made shelter with just one room, which she shares with 12 other people. Her home is made from one wall of breezeblocks and finished with plastic sheeting and cardboard boxes. The floor is wet and icy cold, and outside snow melts into the ground, creating icy mud.

“[My family] decided to come to Lebanon because of the fighting that was taking place,” Samira told Oxfam last month. “The shelling and the shooting were happening while we were trying to live peacefully in our homes. It has been eight months since I left my home. I have no idea what happened to it; we just had to leave it behind and escape because of the fighting.”

An estimated 670,000 people have fled violence in Syria to neighboring countries since the onset of the crisis in March 2011. The region is now experiencing harsh winter weather conditions, with heavy rain and snowstorms sending temperatures plummeting to below zero. Many of the displaced are living in shelters with no winter clothes and no blankets.

Oxfam and its local partners have been distributing blankets, mattresses, heaters, gas oil, and other supplies to help the new arrivals stay warm during the harsh winter. Significant funds are needed to reach more refugees before winter takes its toll.

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

Photo: Holly Pickett/Oxfam America

Sadio Danfakha washes her hands with a tippy-tap, a low-cost, low-tech plastic container used to promote hand washing in places with no running water. Oxfam and our partner AKAD distributed tippy-taps along with soap and bleach (to treat drinking water) as part of our humanitarian program to help people suffering from a dramatic food shortage in 2011-2012.

When I met Danfakha in Senegal last October, she said she had been working closely with Wally Cissokho of AKAD, who is in charge of promoting good hygiene practices as a means to avoid diseases.  “We teach people how to use the hygiene kits, and sometime I show them how to use the kits when Wally is not there.”

Danfakha says that when people starting using the tippy-taps and treated water there were fewer cases of diarrhea in her village, Biatilaye. “We now wash our hands before eating, and we wash our clothes more now. Before, it was hard to get soap to wash our hands, but then Wally came and it is now easier to get soap.”

She says she decided to help promote better hygiene in her village as a volunteer. “I have been going with Wally to distribute the hygiene kits. I do it just to help, because we are all neighbors, and I like to help others.”

“It was not a long time ago that my husband passed away. So I am taking the opportunity to help other people instead of sitting home all alone in the house.”

Asewi Kuoaou is a member of a cocoa grower co-op in Yao, Ivory Coast. Photo by Peter DiCampo/Oxfam.

Are you on Instagram? If not, now might be a good time to sign up. This week, renowned photojournalists and curators of the Everyday Africa project, Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill, are taking over Oxfam America’s Instagram account!

You might remember hearing about the Everyday Africa project from us back in September. Originally, Peter and Austin teamed up to counteract the extreme media images of Africa by sharing photos from across the continent of the mundane and familiar, which are equally, if not more enthralling. Now their work has expanded to be featured in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The New York Times, and this week, The New Yorker.

They are posting photos (like the one above) from their recent trip to the Ivory Coast to learn about women cocoa farmers. In the Ivory Coast, like in many countries, women are responsible for the majority of food production, despite having limited access to markets, land, and credit. If women had equal access to resources, their efforts could reduce world hunger, lower child malnutrition, and raise the incomes of rural people around the world. As a part of Oxfam’s GROW campaign, we are working hard to ensure that rural farmers, especially women, have the ability to lift themselves and their families out of poverty.

Follow us on Instagram at @OxfamAmerica to see all of their photos from the field.