Hurricane Sandy brought flooding to Haiti. Photo: Reuters/Swoan Parker, courtesy the Thomson Reuters Foundation – AlertNet

Sophia Lafontant is Oxfam America’s lead organizer for Haiti.

It is amazing how quickly life can change. In a matter of hours, people in New York’s Breezy Point, The Rockaways and Staten Island, in New Jersey’s Atlantic City, in Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti were all faced with the reality of lost property, death, and power outages. It makes me realize how interconnected we all are and dependent on our families, friends, elected officials, and the kindness of strangers to help us when we cannot help ourselves.

I live in Washington, D.C., and while Sandy came through here too, it was not with the same force.  While holed up in my apartment for the better part of two days, my mind and thoughts often raced to Haiti, where 54 people reportedly died in the storm, and my extended family and friends still there. Both my parents were born and raised on the island and came to the US as young adults to escape the repressive government of Jean Claude Duvalier. Like many children of immigrant parents, I was raised with one foot in the US and one foot in Haiti. Despite the extreme differences, I love both countries dearly. As an American, I cherish the opportunities and freedoms I have had all my life living here. But Haiti, the land of my parents’ birth, pulls at my heart strings constantly. And the storm, in an odd way, brought into focus for me the sudden similarities in these neighboring nations: the anxiety, fear, loss, suffering, and high-level discussions about if and how to rebuild. Read the rest of this entry »

By participating in emergency preparedness and response, says Doris Escobar (left), “women have put themselves in the service of their communities and have been recognized for that.” Photo by René Figueroa/Oxfam America

“Many women have become more respected leaders as a result of their work on disasters,” said Doris Escobar, my guide on a recent trip to El Salvador.

As we made our way from a flood-affected village in the western department of Ahuachapán to another across the country in San Miguel, Doris told me the story of how a team of first responders made a difference when an extraordinary storm struck El Salvador in October 2011. (Read about the team’s response to the flood emergency.)

The team was founded four years ago by Oxfam and our Salvadoran partners, and it is coordinated by Escobar herself. It began as a core group of dedicated volunteers—more than half of them women—interested in becoming experts in emergency WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene promotion) and willing to be deployed anywhere in the country at a moment’s notice. More recently, the group has been training up new members from 150 communities around the country to ensure that the people who are living in vulnerable areas have the know-how to protect the health and safety of their neighbors.

 Helping women take leadership has been a priority from day one.

“Self-esteem is so low in women in the communities,” said Escobar. Many, she said, “feel they can’t do anything except work in the kitchen, prepare food, care for children, and clean.”

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We caught colleagues Karina Copen and Enrique Garcia on the phone in El Salvador this morning before they headed out the door for a day in the field.

The flooding and landslides in Central America this past week have been disastrous – the result of rainfall so heavy that it’s outstripped even the catastrophic hurricane Mitch of 1998. In El Salvador, landslides are occurring by the hundreds, and nearly 50,000 people have taken refuge in shelters.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been affected by the rains and flooding in Central America.

But thanks to a carefully positioned warehouse packed with supplies and a network of trained partners, Oxfam was able to reach thousands of people with aid by the time a national state of emergency was declared.  The warehouse is more or less empty now, but that’s a good thing, said Karina. “What people needed was what we had.”

After updating us on the latest events, Karina and Enrique talked about the past, present, and future. Years of work to help communities, partners, and the government prepare for emergencies are paying off in lives saved: the death toll from this massive storm doesn’t compare to Mitch. But the loss of homes and crops could be devastating for those who can least afford it.

“We need to keep addressing hazards,” said Enrique, “but also the issues that put poor people at such risk in emergencies.”

“The good news,” said Karina, as they signed off, “is that the sun’s out.”

Jeff Deutsch is the manager of Oxfam America’s design and production team. Part of his job is to pay close attention to the images Oxfam uses to portray its work, often relying on pictures shot by others. On a recent field visit to West Africa, he photographed some of that work himself.

Trained as a graphic designer, Deutsch talks about what he captured with his camera. In the first of three audio and photo blogs, he visits Senegal, where water still covered large parts of the city of Pikine six months after a flood hit:

Watch part II.

Adults have to watch their heads as they walk from sandy school yard into classrooms at the Thiaroye Primary School in Pikine. Photo by Jeff Deutsch/Oxfam America.

Talk about a bad first day at a new job: Labisse Diop, head teacher at a primary school outside Dakar, Senegal, has a story few could top. At the beginning of the school year last fall, he showed up for work to find his school completely flooded. “I was really surprised…I said ‘this water can’t be removed, it’s too deep…’ and I asked myself why others who worked here before had not addressed the situation.”

Staff at the Thiaroye Primary School, in the city of Pikine, were already at work, pumping the water out of the school and into a drainage channel and away from the neighborhood. But they needed fuel to run the pumps – and they got it from an organization called Eau-Vie-Environnement (Water-Life-Environment, EVE for short). “Thanks to EVE, they made it easier by bringing fuel,” Diop says. Read the rest of this entry »

Families in the Dadu district of Pakistan's Sindh province are still battling flood waters that keep their villages submerged. Photo by Caroline Gluck/Oxfam

Oxfam’s Caroline Gluck reports from Sindh.

The road heading towards Qaimjatoi, in Dadu district in Pakistan’s southern Sindh looked like it was disappearing into the river.  A week ago, it was impassable; now, it was still surrounded by flooded rice fields, but most of the road had, at last, re-emerged from the waters. 

All around us, rice fields and trees were submerged.

We were going to meet 18-year-old Sakina Ghaincha, living with hundreds of other displaced families on a narrow ridge of an elevated embankment.  The families are living here in makeshift wooden shelters, with straw mats hung over the top as a roof. Colourful hand-stitched patchwork quilts, called rili and made locally, were strung along the sides of some shacks, affording families a little privacy and also some warmth when night temperatures drop.

Many people could see their flooded villages from the elevated bank, but couldn’t get back to them yet because the flood waters were still several feet high.  For most, boat travel remained the only way in and out.

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"I want to rebuild our home... and restart our livelihood," says Raiza, pictured, whose farm was destroyed in Pakistan's recent floods. Photo: Jane Beesley / Oxfam

Oxfam’s Jane Beesley is in Pakistan, where the devastating floods have now affected 21 million people. Here’s an excerpt from her latest report from the field.

Today I met Raiza, a petite young woman of 22, who’s living in a camp for displaced people at Government High School in Shirkapur district in Sindh province. In conjunction with our local partner group Participatory Development Initiative, Oxfam is providing the 360 families living at the school with cash vouchers for 5,000 rupees (about $58). These vouchers help ensure that people can buy what they need to get by in the camps for at least the next two to three weeks.

“Before the flood I was farming and keeping livestock, and my husband cut people’s hair. Any money I made I gave to my husband and he decided what to spend it on. We didn’t own the land we were living on…we were tenant farmers,” Raiza told me.

“When the flood came we were just sitting in our home. We didn’t know the flood was coming…we just heard the water…we just had to leave our village. The water came very fast. We could only save our children, ourselves and some clothes…we didn’t even have time to save some crockery and other things. We lost everything … our home, livestock.

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I just wanted to share some of the recent photos I’ve seen coming in this week from Pakistan, where more than 21 million people have been affected by the recent flooding.

Above, a young girl carries a water bottle on her head while taking refuge in a graveyard with her family in Thatta, about 62 miles from Karachi in Pakistan’s Sindh province. While international funding for the crisis has stalled in recent weeks, the number of people displaced by the floods continues to rise each day.

Photo: Jane Beesley / Oxfam

Oxfam and our partners have launched a rapid-relief effort to reach more than one million people with essential aid. Some of that aid takes the form of hygiene kits, like the one shown above. Each hygiene kit includes 15 bars of soap for personal use, soap for washing clothes, two towels, a cloth that can be cut into strips for sanitary protection, a plastic kettle for washing, and two buckets with lids.

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A person points towards their flooded home from a hilltop overlooking Nowshera, located in Pakistan's northwest Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province.

In this excerpt, Rebecca Barber, Oxfam’s humanitarian policy and advocacy advisor in Pakistan, reflects on the human scope of this month’s catastrophic floods. Learn more about what Oxfam is doing in Pakistan, or go here to donate to Oxfam’s flood relief and recovery efforts.

First, we heard that the recent floods in Pakistan were the worst in a generation. Then it was the worst natural disaster in the country’s history. Then—the one we hear time and again–the number of people affected was more than the Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, and the Haiti earthquake put together. The Pakistani Prime Minister told us that the floods were “worse than partition.” The BBC told us that the floods would cover a third of England. … All with a view to getting people around the world somehow to picture the immensity of what’s happening to Pakistan.  

But while such comparisons can help to convey the scale of the crisis, what they don’t and can’t convey is the suffering that every one of the millions of people affected—or at least the eight million whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed–are going through.

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“The floods that have surged from the north to the south of Pakistan since late July have uprooted millions of people. Many have lost their houses, their loved ones, and everything they own,” says Oxfam America’s Mike Delaney in our new video (above). Oxfam and our partners are rushing to reach survivors with clean water and sanitation before deadly waterborne disease compounds the disaster.

Millions of people. When you’re talking about numbers this big, it’s easy to think in abstractions. But each person affected by the floods has his or her own story to tell. In the excerpt below, Oxfam’s Tariq Malik shares the words of some of the people he’s met in Kot Mithan, a district of southern Punjab province hit hard by flooding from the Indus River.

“I am fifty years old and I have never seen Kot Mithan flooded. I never even heard of it,” says Jam Bugho, a small-scale cotton grower. “Scrabbling knee-deep through the water carrying two of my nephews on my shoulders, I have made it out of the village, along with my wife. Before we [left] my son went to look for cows, just to see if he could manage to take a few with him, if not all, but he did not return. We decided not to wait for him and joined others.”

“Is there any way to know what might have happened with my son? My buffalos, cows and my goats?” asks Bugho.

“We have been here [in a camp for displaced people] for two days,” says Khuda Bakhash, whose village in Wasti Hayderabad had been flooded. “We had to pay 100 Rupees ($1.17) to a private boat owner for each person. Most of our relatives are still [in our village]. The day we moved we had nothing to eat and you know well that children can’t sleep if they do not eat well. For two days we’ve been provided with meals twice a day by Oxfam.”

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