This post was co-authored by Victoria Marzilli and Anna Kramer.

By now we’ve probably all heard 2012 being called a new “year of the woman.” From a record number of females elected into the US Congress, to the young Pakistani education activist who was TIME’s runner-up for Person of the Year (with Hillary Clinton and Marissa Mayer making the shortlist), the girls are seriously representing this year. But, even with all the focus on these extraordinary women, we feel like there’s still something missing.

You see, working at Oxfam, we have the incredible opportunity to hear stories of people who beat the odds every day. But what we’ve learned is that those odds are, more often than not, stacked against women. So in the spirit of reflection, we’ve chosen five more women–who you probably have never heard of–who are inspiring us to keep up the fight for social justice and keep changing the world for the better.

1. The spokeswoman

Photo: Jacob Silberberg/Oxfam America

Nigeria’s Susan Godwin is a farmer, public speaker, feminist, entrepreneur, and human rights activist all rolled into one. As a voice for greater investment in rural women farmers, she’s shared her story with audiences all over the world this year, whether at events organized by US volunteers, the World Food Prize Conference in Iowa, or Oxfam’s ongoing global discussion about the Future of Agriculture. To hear Susan tell her story in her own words, watch the video of Oxfam America’s recent “Talks at Google” event focused on ending hunger.

2. The first responder

Photo: Rene Figueroa/Oxfam America

In El Salvador, Doris Escobar coordinates a core group of dedicated volunteers–more than half of them women–who are experts at emergency water, sanitation, and hygiene promotion. Thanks to training supported by Oxfam, Escobar’s volunteers made a difference when an extraordinary storm struck El Salvador late last year. More recently, the group has been training new members from 150 communities. “It has been a lot of work,” said Escobar, “but we are teaching that women are capable of doing everything that men can. I tell many women, ‘We don’t have to follow behind a man. We can walk in front of one.’” Read the full story here.

3. The smart gardener

Photo: Percy Ramirez/Oxfam America

Luz Sinarahua, 26, leads a group of women and mothers in rural Chirikyacu, Peru, who work together to maintain a community garden that’s far from ordinary. Sinarahua and her fellow women are participants in an Oxfam pilot project that helps indigenous women reclaim their ancestors’ traditional crops while increasing their incomes and combating the effects of climate change. “We are 18 really active women,” saind Sinarahua of her fellow growers. “We are unified, and we coordinate our work.” Read the full story here.

 4. The rural innovator

Photo: Sokunthea Chor/Oxfam America

Chheng Cheeung, a rice farmer from Cambodia’s Pursat province, was one of the first farmers in her village to try the System of Rice Intensification, an innovative method that can grow more rice using less water and fewer resources. Though her neighbors laughed at her at first, Chheng proved them wrong when her stronger crops not only survived a flood: they flourished. She was able to double her income from her rice crop–money that she invested in her daughter’s education–and now serves as a model for innovation throughout her community. Read the rest of her story here.

5. The female food hero

Photo: Oxfam

Oxfam’s Female Food Hero contest is raising the profile of women in places like Tanzania and Ethiopia—where women grow, cook, and produce most of their countries’ food, but are rarely publicly recognized for their accomplishments. Sister Martha Waziri, this year’s winner of the contest in Tanzania, reclaimed a barren, unwanted patch of land and turned it into a source of food and income, and then motivated others in her community to do the same. “Sister Martha is not an agro-science expert,” wrote Oxfam’s Mwanahamisi Salimu earlier this year. “But this extraordinary woman from an ordinary rural community has made a substantial contribution to conserve her environment and made a remarkable difference in the lives of her fellow villagers.” Read the rest of her story here.

 We want to hear from you: What other unsung women heroes changed the world in 2012? Tell us by leaving a comment below.

On OxfamBuzzList we mostly review books, blogs, and movies that we want to recommend to our supporters. But every once in a while, we’ll sound the alarm when we think someone’s got it wrong.

A good example: The trailer for “The Impossible,” starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts, sure looks like it may have missed the point of one of the worst humanitarian disasters in history.

The clip shows the fear and chaos that come when a family of white tourists in Thailand are split up by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. The special effects look amazing and terrifying; the movie captures visually what photos from those days attempted to convey. As a mom, my stomach turns when I watch McGregor and Watts’ try to locate their lost children in the chaos, in the midst of their own pain and suffering.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai undercity” and it will open your eyes about what it means to really get to know a place and its people and to tell their story accurately–no small responsibility. This is the story of Annawadi, a desperately poor community of families trying to carve a life for themselves just beyond the luxury hotels circling India’s international airport in Mumbai. It’s the story of worlds colliding in a global economy.

To tell it, Boo–a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post and now a writer for The New Yorker–spent more than three years listening to and watching all that went on in Annawadi, conducting countless interviews, scouring thousands of public records, videoing, photographing, scribbling. She had married an Indian and was determined to get to know his country on its own terms.

“I had felt a shortage in nonfiction about India,” Boo writes in her author’s note, “of deeply reported accounts showing how ordinary low-income people–particularly women and children–were negotiating the age of global markets. I’d read accounts of people who were remaking themselves and triumphing in software India, accounts that sometimes elided early privileges of caste, family wealth, and private education. I’d read stories of saintly slumdwellers trapped in a monochromatically miserable place–that is, until saviors (often white Westerners) galloped in to save them. I’d read tales of gangsters and drug lords who spouted language Salman Rushdie would envy.”

Boo’s book is none of that–though her language sings with Rushdie’s. It is the story, as she says, of ordinary people, the extraordinary things they do to survive, and truths that may change the way you see the world. What more can you ask of a book?

OxfamBuzzList is a new blog series about the movies, books, blogs, TV shows, music, and more that have Oxfam staff and supporters talking. Please leave a comment, or offer us your own contribution (400 words or less). E-mail Andrea Perera, Oxfam America’s Web Editor, at aperera@oxfamamerica.org.

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

Farmers transplanting rice in Pursat province, Cambodia. Photo by Sokunthea Chor/Oxfam America.

A recent trip around the magnificent Tonle Sap lake reminded me how close to extreme poverty so many farming families can be, needing only a small nudge in the wrong direction to change their lives in ways that can take them decades to recover.

The reminder came while visiting Yem Dieb and Say Chhoun in Pursat, a province south of the lake. The wife and husband had learned how to grow rice using the System of Rice intensification thanks to the work of our partner Srer Khmer, which has trained nearly a thousand farmers in SRI over the last two years in Pursat.

Say Chhoun is a humble man but he is obviously proud of his rice-growing accomplishments over the last couple of years, as he took one small field producing one bag of rice a year to six, first by doubling his yield, then learning to produce three crops in a year instead of just one. It is still not enough to feed his entire family, which includes nine children, so Chhoun is also renting fields from other farmers to try to piece together enough land to grow the rice his family needs to survive. Read the rest of this entry »

The flood destroyed Sorn Ra’s small rice crop, so she migrated to a neighboring province to work as a farm laborer for about $3.50 a day while her husband went to yet a different province to pan for gold. She got sick and used all her wages to buy medication. She then came home to Osala and got a cash grant from APA and Oxfam and bought some peanut seeds, which she planted behind her house. She hopes to harvest 50 kilos of peanuts she can sell. She also bought 100 kilos of rice, which she anticipates will last her and her husband for four months. Photo by Sokunthea Chor/Oxfam America.

Pram Kimsot says it is easy to see which of the 200 families in his village are suffering the worst following flooding in the late summer and fall of 2011: “There’s no rice straw piled up in front of our houses,” he says. “It shows you didn’t have a good harvest, and this year it is one of the worst harvests we’ve ever had.”

Pram’s village is called Osala, and it is right on the edge of the Stoeung Sen river in Cambodia’s Kampong Thom province, one of the most severely affected in three months of flooding last year. All in all, 17 of Cambodia’s 24 provinces were hit by flooding, and the government estimates it drowned about 15 percent of national rice production for the year. In Kampong Thom, about half the land used for growing rice was inundated, destroying 35 percent of the crop in that province, and affecting 54,000 people.

Few of the straw piles in Osala are more than about four feet high. Many of the homes have no straw piles at all. So what can farmers do to recover? Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Halima Hussein is a nurse in a therapeutic feeding center in Mogadishu. Photo by Caroline Gluck

Oxfam’s Caroline Gluck spoke recently with Halima Hussein, a 42-year-old nurse working for SAACID, one of Oxfam’s local partners in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. She’s based at the emergency therapeutic center in Badbaado, the city’s largest camp for people displaced by the conflict and drought ravaging the country. Here, in an interview recorded by Gluck, Hussein talks about the challenges of the job and what keeps her going.

“I work with mothers and with children. Every day we see on average 200 to 250 people.   They are in different situations. Some are severely malnourished, some are moderately malnourished; others have complications.

 “People come to us initially for an assessment, and if we can treat them we do this in the center. If there are complications, we might have to refer them to a hospital.

“I’m a mother myself. I have five children. The oldest is 21. The others are 18, 14, 5, and 4.  I think about my family a lot in terms of this work.  I always think if this is my child, if they are like this, what could I do for them?  Sometimes I cry when I see the mothers like me suffering and others less fortunate than me…

“We face many problems.  The biggest one I have is how to convince a mother that it’s best to refer her child to the hospital when the child is suffering so much.  They often tell us:  ‘I have four to five other children at home.  Who’ll take care of them?’  Instead of spending four to five days with one child, they think of the other children…

“Three or four children are dying every week in Badbaado. These are children that I see or know about but I think the actual cases are far higher.  Read the rest of this entry »

Oxfam's partner, Hijra, is helping to supply clean water to displaced people in Somalia.

 Oxfam’s Caroline Gluck writes about a recent field visit to Somalia where Oxfam and its local partners are providing life-saving assistance to families struggling in the face of famine and conflict.

It’s hard to blend in during a community visit when you’re wearing a heavy flak jacket. But here I was in Mogadishu, the conflict-ravaged capital of Somalia, dressed not in the hijab I’d just bought in Kenya, thinking it was culturally appropriate, but strapped into a bullet proof protective vest, weighing about 22 pounds, slowing down my movements as I ran about trying to film the work Oxfam is supporting and marking me out clearly as a foreigner.

I was part of Oxfam’s first visit to Somalia by non-African staffers in years.   The country has been mired in civil conflict for the past 20 years, and now severe drought has pushed millions into desperation.  The UN has declared six areas of the country famine-affected; more than a quarter of the population has been displaced by the crisis and conflict, with several hundred thousand fleeing into neighboring countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia.  And inside the country, many more are displaced.  Hundreds of thousands have taken shelter in makeshift settlements and camps around the capital, Mogadishu.  

I visited some of those camps with two Oxfam partners, Hijra, which specializes in providing water, sanitation and hygiene, and SAACID (a Somali word meaning “to help”), whose therapeutic care centers for malnourished children and mothers are supported by Oxfam. But we were under strict security rules and told not to linger in one place for too long: Somalia is not like most other countries.  While the security situation has improved in central Mogadishu, no one takes things for granted. People still worry about getting shot or abducted, cars being targeted, and explosive devices going off.

Gunshots often ring out – sometimes fired into the air by government forces or peacekeepers simply to clear traffic jams because there are no working traffic lights in the city. 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.

Read the rest of this entry »