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.

Entrepreneur Marie Carole St. Juste, right, with her mother Marie Carmel Etienne outside her shop in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A small-business grant from Oxfam helped St. Juste reopen her store selling cold drinks after it was destroyed in Haiti's 2010 earthquake. Photo: Toby Adamson / Oxfam

I tend to resist holidays that are construed by purveyors of greetings cards, florists, and chocolate makers. Sentimental gushes of appreciation leave me in a state of shock and awe. Why is it considered important to honor mothers on May 8 (Mother’s Day falls on this date in the US)? I looked up the historical significance of this day, and couldn’t find any substantial information that convinced me of its importance. What then is the point?

That’s why, as I researched potential gift ideas for moms from Oxfam America Unwrapped this year, it struck me that I’m not the most ideal candidate for this role.

Still, I reflected on the holiday for a few days, and threw possible ideas on the white board of my skeptical mind. Seasonally, spring is a time of renewal and rebirth, connecting directly with motherhood. Ancient cultures celebrated women for their fertility, and the environmental angle is well established. We have only to say the words “Mother Earth” and images of abundance: lush forests, and streams teeming with fish spring up.

Most vital, however, and what convinced me of the importance of this holiday, were the stark facts about women and poverty:

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To get the full story of President Obama’s recent visit to my home city, Mumbai, I knew at once to call a reliable source on the ground—my mom.  She exclaimed that taxi drivers and families eager to celebrate Diwali, the Indian festival of lights, were bemoaning the restrictions on the roads due to strict security measures in this city of over 21 million.

Despite those grumblings, Obama received a warm welcome on his three day visit, and several news reports lauded the special friendship between Obama and India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. This friendship is certainly to be lauded because of the mutual benefit it could have for two of the world’s largest democracies in terms of security and growth.

However, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that India continues to face severe challenges posed by widespread poverty and unequal access to limited resources: A third of the world’s poorest people live in India, for example, and half of its children are malnourished.

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The system of rice intensification, or SRI, is an agircultural technique that improves the yields of farmers while using fewer seeds and less water. The method is improving the lives of more than 80,000 farmers in Cambodia. Photo by Isabelle Lesser/Oxfam America

“One sixth of humanity undernourished”

That was the stark headline on a news story put out at the end of last week by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. All it takes is some simple math, and suddenly the immensity of the global hunger problem is as clear as a line in the sand: five of us stand on this side, one of us on the other. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently mailed a package to my son in India. His birthday was coming and he said he longed for some favorites from home—including meat. I obliged, loading the box with beef jerky and other goodies. When one of your own says he’s hungry, you want to fill him up. It’s a maternal instinct, surely.

But what was I thinking? Read the rest of this entry »

Sahera begins her morning duties as a rag-picker in Lucknow, India, where Oxfam funds a school and health programs for working children. According to Peter Singer, kids—in India and elsewhere—are one of the groups most at risk from poverty-related diseases. Photo: Tom Pietrasik / Oxfam

When I visited my hometown of Bombay, India, last month, I found myself trapped in complex moral dilemmas, even as I went through the motions of everyday life. There, the urban poor live smashed up against a growing affluent class. Despair, hunger, and homelessness rest uneasily side-by-side with designer boutiques and Western-inspired malls.

I remember tightly clutching my ice cream cone on a crowded commuter train, the sticky cream melting down my wrist in the midday heat. But how could I eat it when a little boy stared at me, wide-eyed, hungry, and begging for spare change?

Back home in Boston, I attended a reading last week by the author Peter Singer. Singer, the renowned and prolific Princeton bioethicist, has championed animal rights and written passionately about the ethics of giving. His new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, posits the moral argument that each one of us has the power to make a difference in the fight against poverty.

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Last night I was trolling around the web, reading up on the Academy Awards nominees. I found an article about “Slumdog Millionaire” the movie about a poor boy who grows up to become a contestant on India’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”  As I was reading about the movie, I clicked on a link about the controversies surrounding the film. One is that the movie is less a realistic view of poverty in India, and more an exploitative look at the country’s slums.

A columnist from Britain’s Times calls the movie “poverty porn” and writes: ” … the film is vile. Unlike other Boyle films such as Trainspotting or Shallow Grave, which also revel in a fantastical comic violence, Slumdog Millionaire is about children. And it is set not in the West but in the slums of the Third World. As the film revels in the violence, degradation and horror, it invites you, the Westerner, to enjoy it, too.”

Hmmm. I don’t know that I agree with that summation. In fact, I think using the term “poverty porn” is, in its own way, exploiting poor people for the sake of selling newspapers. But I can see how someone who watched the movie might have felt uncomfortable watching it. Read the rest of this entry »

Jamil Hamzah walks through rice fields in Gampang Ladang, Indonesia, where Oxfam helped farmers purchase rice paddy seed. According to a new UN report, Indonesia is one of just seven countries where 65 percent of the world’s hungry people live. Photo: Jim Holmes/Oxfam

Each day, the epidemic is spreading further across the globe, extending its tendrils into every nation on earth. It strikes women and children first, as well as the poorest among us. Nearly 1 billion people are already affected, and this year alone, an additional 40 million more suffered its symptoms: fatigue, dizziness, extreme weakness, even death.

The thing is, you don’t read much about this epidemic in the headlines these days. No one’s handing out ribbons or marching for a cure. Though it’s treatable, people aren’t doing much to prevent it. In fact, hardly anyone seems to be paying attention.

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Before she left on a field visit to India and Sri Lanka, a colleague dropped off a present at my desk: three red-skinned potatoes in a plastic sack—the remains of the stash she keeps handy for lunch. She didn’t want them to rot while she was away, and being a spud fan I was glad to get them, especially now that I’ve learned that 2008 is the International Year of the Potato—so named by the United Nations at the behest of Peru.

In a year that’s experiencing a frightening global food crisis, choosing to promote this stalwart tuber—people in the Peruvian highlands have been eating them for more than 8,000 years—seems more than serendipitous. It’s imperative. There are lots of reasons why. Read the rest of this entry »