Photo: Brett Eloff/Oxfam America

Note: This post kicks off a new blog series for 2013 on the transformative power of photography. Each week we will highlight one outstanding Oxfam photo and share more information about the story behind the image. Your feedback and suggestions are welcome!

As the director of the Malawi Health Equity Network, Martha Kwaitane is leveraging a tiny investment of US foreign aid to improve rural people’s access to quality healthcare throughout Malawi.

If you live in Washington, DC, or visit in the city in the coming weeks, you might spot Brett Eloff’s portrait of Kwaitane, above, in the airport or on the Metro. She’s one of four inspiring leaders featured on a brand-new series of Oxfam billboards, which call on US legislators not to cut the global poverty-fighting assistance that helps people like Kwaitane transform their countries.

Read more about Martha Kwaitane and the billboards here.

We’re excited about the global premiere of “One Day on Earth” at the United Nations this Sunday. The movie records the human experience over a 24-hour period using material crowd-sourced from all over the world.

Oxfam contributed footage to “One Day on Earth” film. We asked our affiliates and partners working in 99 countries across the world to reflect on the specific issues of health and education — and why these are fundamental rights — and then to seek out images and interviews on the subject.

Watch the trailer for the film (it gave me goose bumps…the good kind) and then share with your friends.

One Day on Earth – Global Screening Trailer from One Day on Earth on Vimeo.

Here’s a sample Tweet to get you going:

Oxfam contributed to the unique @onedayonearth documentary (all filmed on 10/10/10). Attend free screening this Sunday! http://ow.ly/aq53H

Oxfam America’s Coco McCabe is in Haiti this week, where she’s reporting on the latest from the rebuilding process in the wake of January’s devastating earthquake.

Oxfam's Kenny Rae discusses plans with the Rev. Jean Jacques Frederick. Photo: Coco McCabe / Oxfam America

For a moment, it looked like the family of five might have to move again.

Their shelter—a blue cube made of plastic sheeting—stood on the muddy ground where a team of engineers from Oxfam and Allied Recovery International was now considering installing a pair of septic tanks for a new bank of latrines. The old ones at the back of the camp were slowly filling, and having flush toilets would be a welcome amenity for many who have had so few creature comforts since the earthquake destroyed much of Port-au-Prince.

“Hmmm,” said church supporter Magda Pierre Paul, a worried look on her face. She shot the Rev. Jean Jacques Frederick a questioning look. The discussion concerned Delmas 75, a camp of 165 tents across the street from Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a church that had collapsed into a heap of rubble.

Rev. Frederick studied the plans: two 1,600-gallon septic tanks, eight flush toilets—four for men, four for women—and a well to provide water to make the whole enterprise work smoothly. In the small camps that have cropped up across the city, where shelters stand almost on top of each other, space for essentials such as latrines and bathing stalls is at a premium. Any patch of empty earth is also a place a displaced family could pitch a tent, pitting the critical need for protecting public health against the equal imperative of shelter. And now, the engineers were asking for a call to be made in the camp his church had organized.

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People wait outside a mobile clinic to test for signs of H1N1 virus, formerly referred to as swine flu, in Mexico City on April 30, 2009. REUTERS/Jorge Dan (Mexico Health Society), courtesy www.alertnet.org.

I’m on the subway and–though I’m ashamed to admit it–I’m afraid the woman next to me has swine flu. Since she sat down two stops ago, she’s been wheezing, each breath rasping with a sound like ripping fabric. Periodically she sneezes, sending tiny particles of spit into the air.

I inch away on the hard plastic seat until I can’t go any further. Now I’m intruding on the space of the man on my other side, who eyes me with alarm.

Like me, he’s probably thinking that every surface around us is coated in germs–after all,  yesterday Vice President Joe Biden warned his family to avoid enclosed spaces because the risk of swine flu, also known as the H1N1 virus. “I would not be, at this point, if they had another way of transportation, suggesting they ride the subway,” Biden said.

It’s true that if I could afford a car, I wouldn’t be here, inhaling the tired, possibly polluted breath of strangers. I’ve taken public transportation every day for years, but now that phrases like “pandemic potential” have been tossed around, things seem different. As I go down the steps into the warm, damp subterranean air, I want to hold my breath.

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Ntombizodwa Marufu carries water to her home in central Zimbabwe. Photo: Annie Bungeroth / Oxfam

The first headline I saw yesterday morning predicted a dire future for one of the world’s most troubled nations: “Zimbabwe may soon collapse.”

African National Congress president Jacob Zuma attributed this warning to former UN secretary general Kofi Annan and former US president Jimmy Carter, both of whom were denied entrance to Zimbabwe last weekend as part of a delegation from the conflict-resolution group The Elders.

“Zimbabwe may soon collapse.” For some reason, this particular phrase keeps ringing in my mind, even though I feel like I can’t even fully understand what it means. How can a whole country, all its infrastructure, just fall apart? What does that mean for the millions of people who live there? When does it cease to exist? And what is the threshold—the point of no return—when things can’t possibly get any worse?

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When you read about the rate of infection of HIV in South Africa, the numbers are hard to comprehend. It is the country with the most people in the world living with HIV and AIDS: nearly 5.5 million of the country’s total population of 48 million. In some parts of the country one in five is infected. Read the rest of this entry »