MAFLPV founder Marie Melisma Robert (right) with members of her organization, standing in a field of rice. Oxfam has helped MAFLPV members make the transition to a high-yield growing technique. Photo: Anna Fawcus/Oxfam

When a massive earthquake struck Haiti in January, 2010, it shone a spotlight on the need to ease the dangerous overcrowding of the capital city of Port-au-Prince. So, after responding to the disaster with emergency programs, Oxfam shifted some of our focus to the countryside. Together with our partners, we ramped up our program to reinvigorate the rice economy of the Artibonite Valley, with the goals of reducing rural poverty, contributing to food security in Haiti, and—by making rice farming more viable—counteracting the continuous pull to migrate from the country to the city. As Oxfam’s Elizabeth Stevens reports in a series of blog posts, Haiti’s rice farmers are embracing the program and making it their own.

My first meeting with a women’s group in Haiti was on a pitch-black night. At first there were just a few of us sitting on a porch, our faces lit by the eerie glow of a solar lamp, but every few minutes a new arrival emerged from the darkness, and soon the crowd was spilling out into the yard.

The Mouvement d’Aide des Femmes Liancourt-Payen de la commune de Verrettes (MAFLPV) is a key partner for Oxfam in the rice-growing Artibonite Valley. It’s a women’s organization that provides its members with access to low-interest loans so they can successfully market rice and whatever other goods they want to sell.

“We used to go to loan sharks when we needed money,” said Marie Melisma Robert, the founder and president of MAFLPV. She explained that the local moneylenders charge monthly interest of 25%. “When we couldn’t pay back the loans, we were arrested.” Now the women have access to credit at three percent – which can spell the difference between a successful business and spiraling debt.

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When a massive earthquake struck Haiti in January, 2010, it shone a spotlight on the need to ease the dangerous overcrowding in the capital city of Port-au-Prince. So, after responding to the disaster with emergency programs,  Oxfam shifted some of our focus to the countryside. Together with our partners, we ramped up our efforts to reinvigorate the rice economy of the Artibonite Valley, with the goals of reducing rural poverty, contributing to food security in Haiti, and—by making rice farming more viable —counteracting the continuous pull to migrate from the country to the city. As Oxfam’s Elizabeth Stevens reports in a series of blog posts, Haiti’s rice farmers are embracing the program and making it their own.

"If your crops fail, you become poor," said Willi Elimelec (above). "You can't send your children to school." Photo: Elizabeth Stevens/Oxfam

Here in the lush Artibonite Valley—a region that produces an abundance of rice—the farmers are poor. Undercut in the market by cheap imported rice and lacking the basic governmental supports that farmers in wealthy countries take for granted, Haiti’s small-scale rice growers can barely eke out a living.

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As a Radiohead fan, I’m always proud to count the band among the list of great artists supporting Oxfam America. Ever since Haiti was devastated by a major earthquake in January 2010, Radiohead and their fans have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to support Oxfam’s Haiti earthquake relief and recovery efforts, via a benefit concert, fan-sourced concert videos, and more.

Just last week, a group of fans released a new concert film of Radiohead’s show at New York City’s Roseland Ballroom on September 29, 2011—one of only two US shows the band played that year. (I was lucky enough to be there that night, along with a group of Oxfam concert volunteers who reached out to Radiohead fans before the performance.) The crowd-sourced video was created with the blessing of the band, who even contributed audio from the soundboard of the show.

The film, below, is free, but they are asking those who watch and download it to give to two great causes: Hurricane Sandy relief in the US and Oxfam America’s Haiti Earthquake Fund. As Oxfam’s programs in Haiti move more toward long-term rebuilding and recovery efforts, it’s good to know that Radiohead and their fans are still supporting the cause.

Farmers clearing a field near Brocozele, in the Artibonite River valley in Haiti. Photo by Brett Eloff/Oxfam America

In a small town called Brocozele, you can stand at the edge of the irrigation channel running along the road and look out across the rice fields and see the problem: One part of the vast area in front of you is green with the nearly mature rice plants, and just next to it is a grey, brown expanse of land choked with weeds and little else. The local farmers just can’t get the water up and out of the irrigation channel and into these fields. And for the last 18 months they say there has not been enough rain to bother planting there. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month I met a young man named Sady Civil in Port-au-Prince at a camp called Delmas 3 where he is an assistant public health promoter. His job is to teach people the importance of good hygiene as a means to avoid major disease outbreaks, which can kill just as many people as any earthquake.

When he first arrived, there were about 7,000 people living in Delmas 3. “It was very dirty, there were feces everywhere,” he says, walking along the main road next to the camp. On the day we visited workers were digging several large pits to install 16 new permanent latrines. This would make roughly one latrine for every 110 camp residents, still not enough, but an improvement.

“It’s a lot cleaner here now,” Civil says. “We’ve seen a lot of good changes.” Read the rest of this entry »

It took me all year, but I finally made it to Haiti earlier this month. It’s a fascinating and beautiful country facing some daunting challenges, and it was an honor for me to participate in Oxfam’s response to the earthquake and the cholera epidemic.

The best moments of the trip were meeting with entrepreneurs rebuilding their businesses right out of the rubble of their homes and their lives. We met one woman named Carole who runs a small shop in the Carrefour Feuilles district in Port-au-Prince out of a small shipping container on the ruins of her home. She painted it pink on the inside. “I just like pink,” she says. She now lives in what used to be a warehouse next door. The roof leaks so much, when it rains, she says, “it’s like being outside.”

“Oxfam is the only one who came here,” she says. We gave her the shipping container, set it up on her land, and helped her with a grant to stock it with drinks, toilet paper, matches, and canned goods. “It put joy in my heart,” she says, “If it weren’t for this container, I don’t know when I would be on my feet…” Now, she says, “I’m on my way.”
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Garde Tilmark and Gregory Mordaly unload gravel at the Colora irrigation project. Ami Vitale/Oxfam America

“QUELQUES PHOTOS” shouted the subject line of the email.

Someone’s excited, I thought, as my brain registered the caps but stalled at the French.

It was Yves Guillame Chancy, the technical manager of PROBINA , an Oxfam Quebec partner in Haiti, and when I opened his message and clicked on the attachments I saw why. High in the hills of Colora, a farming community several hours’ drive northwest of Port-au-Prince, construction of the small irrigation system Chancy had been overseeing was now finished and he had sent pictures to show me.

“The last time in Belladere you see the men at work—and today an idea of the finished work,” said Chancy in his short, but proud message. His enthusiasm was infectious. I grinned. Watch the work here.

Down below, water would be snaking through more than 60 acres of fields bringing the promise of abundant crops to about 150 farmers. And instead of just one harvest a year, some farmers said they would be able to coax three from their fields now that they’ll have a reliable source of water.

“It means my family will have more food and a harvest to sell and our kids will go to school,” said Laventure Benad. In Haiti, where nearly 8o percent of the country’s 9.6 million people live on less than $2 a day and 38 percent of them over the age of 15 are illiterate, the new reality Benad hopes for is no small feat. And it’s the kind of step forward that will be essential to replicate if Haiti is to recover from the devastation left in the wake of January 12 earthquake. Read the rest of this entry »

Marie Carole Bourslquot. Photo: Jane Beesley / Oxfam

The rainy season has started in Haiti—the time many have dreaded for the extra misery it will bring to people who lost their homes in the January 12 earthquake. Plastic sheets strung overhead are all that many of them have for protection, making rainy nights long and exhausting. That’s why the coping strategy of Marie Carole Bourslquot is so remarkable. She’s one of the small vendors Oxfam’s partner has hired to cook food for the most vulnerable people in her neighborhood, and she shares a shelter with her mother, two sisters, a brother, and three of his children.

“We stay awake and tell jokes,” said Bourslquot.

“We lost a brother in the earthquake and since then our mother has been very down. We’ve been trying to encourage her….When we told her a joke, she started to smile so now we tell her jokes to make her laugh. We want her to smile again.”

But the energy Bourslquot and her siblings pour into easing their mother’s sorrow can’t alter this simple fact of their life during the last three months: “This area where we live is now very bad. It’s not fit for humans to live,” said Bourlsquot, adding they cobbled together a shelter of metal sheets.  With the rain drumming hard around them and seeping into their shelter, family members have no choice but to stay awake, standing on their feet during the downpours which have been coming every night recently.

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After the quake in Chile. Photo by Victor Ruiz Caballero/Reuters, courtesy of Alertnet.

There’s a tendency to compare disasters, and I am sure many of us started to do that Saturday morning when we heard about the 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile. Another earthquake! Is it like the one in Haiti?

The answer is of course no, Chile is a completely different place. Although the earthquake was a significantly stronger (something like 500 times stronger than the 12 January Haiti quake, if that is even possible), it hit a much less densely populated area with a government equipped with resources to respond.

I immediately remembered an article on the BBC web site I read two days after the now infamous Port-au-Prince quake last month. It attempted something incredibly difficult: comparing the relative size, death toll, economic impact, proximity to urban areas and the poverty and population density in affected areas of three earthquakes in China (2008), Italy (2009) and Haiti (2010). Read the rest of this entry »

 Listen to The Breeders, “We’re Gonna Rise”:

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“Let me know if you need anything!”

During the course of my work sharing information about Oxfam, I hear that sentence so often that it’s almost become a generic sort of “goodbye”. Kind of a nicer way of saying “see you later.” It’s because Oxfam supporters in the music industry seem to be extra generous when it comes to making sure we are able to use their voices, and sometimes their art, to help with our work.

On Thanksgiving Eve last year, I had the amazing fortune of being able to see one of my favorite bands, The Pixies, play their famed “Doolittle” album from start to finish at NYC’s Hammerstein Ballroom. The Breeders, the band led by Pixie Kim Deal and her sister Kelley, are Oxfam supporters, most recently helping Oxfam volunteers host informational tables on the extensive tour to support their “Mountain Battles” album.

Kim (left) and Kelley Deal

Kelley invited me to watch The Pixies’s set from the side of the stage with her (which to a huge fan like me was akin to winning the lottery), and afterward I was able to spend some time with Kelley and Kim, talking about Oxfam’s work around the world, the recent Rankin photo exhibit from the Congo, and even a lively discussion about where to get the best cupcakes in Manhattan.

As the evening ended and we all hit the street outside the venue to part ways, Kelley yelled to me, “Let us know if you need anything!”

Little did she and I know that I’d be calling in that favor quicker than hoped.

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