First Person: Voices, video, and photos from Oxfam's fight against poverty

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 »

John Ekono Ekiman is a herder who lost most of his animals to drought. He received four camels and 20 goats as part of Oxfam's restocking program. "I feel really proud of having them," he said of his animals. "In the future I want to expand and grow my camels and goats." Photo: Alejandro Chaskielberg

Judging from the comments on our Facebook wall, many of you liked the stunning new photos taken in Turkana, Kenya, by Alejandro Chaskielberg. The acclaimed Argentinian art photographer traveled to the region with Oxfam to take portraits of people affected by the recent East Africa drought and food crisis. Last week the photos were featured in a slideshow on BBC News, raising awareness of both the crisis and Oxfam’s ongoing response.

In most of the photos, Chaskielberg used his trademark technique of shooting by moonlight, illuminating these scenes of herders and their families with a dramatic, unearthly glow. The results are memorable (and newsworthy) because they’re so distinctive.

However, when we saw how the photos came out, some of my Oxfam colleagues loved them, but others gave them mixed reviews.

Women tend gardens they built with support from an Oxfam project, which aims to help mothers improve nutrition for their children while also earning an income by selling extra vegetables. Photo: Alejandro Chaskielberg

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Sophia Lafontant is Oxfam America’s lead Haiti organizer, working on policy and advocacy issues with the Haitian diaspora. In her first post about Haiti—hours after the earthquake—she recounted her profound worry as she tried desperately to learn the fate of family members still living in the country.

Before my 25^th birthday, I hadn’t been to Haiti since I was a girl in the 1980s. My parents were among the second wave of Haitians that left the country in the decade prior and once the Duvalier regime fell there was enough uncertainty that Haiti became an all but distant memory for them. But I held on to my fond and vivid memories of growing up in my grandmother’s house on Avenue Christophe, in the heart of Port-au-Prince, a few blocks away from the famous Olfoson Hotel which counted Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Mick Jagger as some of its famed international guests during its heyday.

Sophia Lafontant, right, worked with Jacqueline Morette, a farmer and head of an Oxfam partner organization in Haiti.

While I lived in Boston, MA, I always had a foot in Haiti. Like most children of the diaspora, I felt the need to embrace both places. In the summer of 2007, I embarked on my first trip back to Haiti: it had been on my mind and it was time to return to the place I now scarcely remembered. I will never forget the blast of heat that rushed over me when we touched down; it was like someone was holding a blow dryer to my face.

It’s difficult to explain why, but Haiti instantly felt like home. The familiar foods, music, language filled with allusions and metaphors, the stream of relatives and family friends that trickle in throughout the day to greet and welcome me; the constant color everywhere—on tap taps, sides of buildings, street art and of course the brightly painted houses. It all beckoned me–with so much beauty it’s hard not to smile still.

A friend once asked me what makes Haiti so different from other Caribbean countries. I paused to think about what answer I would give. My response was “the struggle.” The long struggle. Haiti has had more than its share of pain and tragedy. Whether it’s the subjugation and indignation of slavery, 32 coups in its history, harsh and crippling international sanctions and policies, and tense relations with its neighbor, the Dominican Republic, and seemingly endless battles with mother nature, Haitians miraculously dig deep to find an inner strength that escapes most of us. And it is that spirit and determination to make a way out of no way that I find beautiful and admire so much.

It’s been two years since the devastating earthquake. Despite the inactions or action of those in power, Haitians will continue to pull money together to pay their children’s school fees, continue to ensure that their uniforms are pressed and clean, and continue to hope that tomorrow is better than today. It is that seemingly bottomless well of hope that keeps me at my computer late into the evening some nights. It’s what keeps me on conference calls with allies and cranking out organizing plans. All minuscule in the grand scheme of things, and none of which can be credited with saving lives or adding to the meager incomes of the millions of Haitians that live on two bucks a day.

Still, it’s the very least I can do for a nation that has given me so much—so much laughter, color, and so much love.

Along with millions of other Americans, I’ll be watching Anquan Boldin and the Baltimore Ravens in the NFL playoffs this weekend—but my mind will be in Ethiopia.

I traveled to southern Ethiopia not long ago to visit Oxfam America’s programs in the area. As we drove, my colleague Tewodros Negash explained why Oxfam uses its cash-for-work program to pay communities to clear brush from the fields by hand, something they’ve done for generations by setting controlled fires. As it turns out, the winds, which for as long as anyone can remember have been predictable, are now wholly unreliable. It used to be that people could set fire to the brush, rely on the wind to control the flames, and have a field that was clear in time for the rains. The grass would grow and their animals would have a place to graze. But with wind that’s unpredictable, and rain that’s even more so, communities must now take steps to survive the effects of climate change.

Just weeks later I told that story to Boldin and his friend and former teammate Larry Fitzgerald, NFL wide receiver for the Arizona Cardinals, during a meeting to discuss Oxfam America’s work. Boldin and Fitzgerald learned this summer of the devastating drought in East Africa and were looking for ways to help, which is why they reached out to Oxfam.

“I’ve been to the Horn of Africa before,” Fitzgerald, who will be appearing in the Pro Bowl for the seventh time later this month, told Yahoo! Sports Radio in a recent interview. “And I’ve seen some of the effects of the drought myself. … When you see [people affected by drought] you definitely want to do something because they are in dire need.”

Since then, in between catching footballs and evading linebackers and safeties, Boldin and Fitzgerald have raised money for Oxfam America on Twitter and Facebook, filmed a public service announcement (below) and used their high profiles to bring attention to the crisis.

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Rice farmer Ynodyl Fils. Photo by Brett Eloff/Oxfam America

Got an unexpected Christmas present this year: I woke up on December 25 to find a story in the New York Times on rural livelihoods in Haiti: Quake-Scarred Nation Tries a Rural Road to Recovery.

Here’s the key paragraph from the story: “When the earthquake leveled Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12, 2010, planners and visionaries here and abroad looked past the rubble and saw an opportunity to fix the structural problems that have kept Haiti stuck in poverty and instability. An idea that won early support was to shrink the overcrowded, underemployed, violence-ridden capital and revive the desiccated, disused farmland that had long been unable to feed the country.”

So I spent part of Christmas morning studying the piece, as I had just spent part of the previous month in Haiti, and was trying to finish a story for Oxfam’s Exchange magazine on the very same topic. (Exchange readers will see it in their mailboxes in about a week.)

(The Times followed this up with an Op-Ed on 9 January by the co-directors of the Haiti Humanities Laboratory at Duke University entitled Haiti Can Be Rich Again encouraging support for small-scale farming. Conclusion: “The return on the investment in the rural economy would be self-reliance, the alleviation of dangerous overcrowding in cities and, most important, a path toward ending Haiti’s now chronic problems of malnutrition and food insecurity.”)

A quick review: lack of investment in agriculture and Haiti’s rural infrastructure, combined with macroeconomic policies that brought in cheap foreign competition in rice and pork and other food, has made farming a difficult way to make a living. Agriculture used to comprise nearly half of Haiti’s GDP; now it amounts to less than a quarter. Haiti now imports much of its food, and farmers have streamed into the city to seek work, part of the reason the January 2010 earthquake was such a disaster: a city designed for roughly a quarter million had about 3 million people there, many living in poorly constructed housing. Read the rest of this entry »

Oxfam’s Caroline Gluck retraces her steps and finds that the challenges many people faced in the wake of the disaster continue to persist—as does their hope for change.

I wasn’t looking forward to returning to Haiti. Two years ago, I was one of the first of Oxfam’s emergency team to fly to the island, arriving three days after it was hit by a devastating earthquake, which killed more than 220,000 people and left more than a million others homeless.

Marguerite Ulysse holds her two-year-old daughter, Neika, who was born in a camp two days after the earthquake. Photo by Caroline Gluck

 First impressions weren’t good. Rubble still lay in the streets. Though much of it was carefully piled up, many collapsed buildings still remained balanced precariously in between other spaces where rebuilding had taken place. 

And then there were the camps of tents. Not the flimsy shelters made of clothing scraps and plastic sheets I’d become so familiar with on my first visit.  These camps appeared depressingly permanent. It seemed people were settling down for good; that what had been a temporary option was now the only long-term solution available.

But many tens of thousands of families camped on private land, not in public spaces, now face the threat of forced evictions, often through the use of violence, by the owners who haven’t received any rent for the past two years. 

I spent the first few days retracing my steps. The old Oxfam office – part of which had been seriously damaged in the quake – had been remodelled and repainted and was now the office of a private company. The damaged annex had been fenced off and the collapsed top two stories had been removed.

The enormous camp for displaced families occupying what had been a golf course in the leafy and well-to-do suburb of Petionville was still bursting at the seams.  Although the number of residents had decreased, people were still living cheek-by-jowl. The daily struggles for the basics–clean water, some privacy, and work–were still as pressing as ever.

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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.