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.

 “Giving is a good business strategy. And there’s nothing wrong with that,” said Blake Mycoskie at last week’s South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference in Austin, TX.

As one of the keynote speakers at the conference—which drew thousands of influential, tech-savvy types from all over the world—Mycoskie knew what he was talking about. The founder of Toms Shoes, he used word of mouth, not advertising, to turn a tiny company based out of his California apartment into a multi-million-dollar business. And he did it using the simple model of “one for one”: For each pair of shoes sold, the company donates a pair to a child in need.

Listening from the back row of a cavernous auditorium in the Austin Convention Center, I couldn’t help but feel moved when Mycoskie talked about his visits to poor communities in South America, which inspired him to do something to help. I, too, have found my life transformed by traveling to places far outside my comfort zone. Most of all, I liked how he had found a way to make addressing poverty into something stylish, catchy, and easy to understand.

Still, I couldn’t figure out what Mycoskie meant when he called giving a “good business strategy.” Was he speaking as an idealist or a pragmatic entrepreneur?  Did he really believe that a for-profit company could make as much difference as a charity? Or was he just stating a blunt truth: namely, people like to buy things that make them feel good about themselves?

Read the rest of this entry »

Meena Amirir says all human beings have the right to go to school. Photo by Louise Hancock/Oxfam

I can only begin to imagine what my life would be like if I didn’t know how to read, if books and a daily newspaper weren’t part of my diet, if I couldn’t decipher the train schedule or track the supermarket ads, if highway signs were incomprehensible and recipes were just a jumble of symbols. I’d feel trapped. And helpless.

What must the women in Afghanistan feel?

Just 12 percent of them over the age of 15 are literate. That means that countless women in one of the poorest nations in the world must depend on others to navigate much of their lives, a dependence that can’t help but weigh heavily on a country desperate for development. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Demitu Gurmessa weeds her field. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

Demitu Gurmessa and her husband, Hussein Kedir, are sitting on a long wooden bench in the dirt yard outside their home in Jello Dida—a community in the Shashamene District of Ethiopia. Nestled with them are some of their nine children.

Demitu holds out her hand to me so I can feel her palm—rough with the countless chores required to keep her family fed, housed, and clothed. Hussein holds out his, too. It feels just like his wife’s, a hand toughened by work in the fields. For poor people in Ethiopia, that’s what life is; they are bound to hard physical labor—to plowing and planting patches of earth, to fetching water and firewood, to herding goats, sheep, and cattle.

But the couple’s hands are tough for another reason: They are determined to send their children to school, and so to make sure the kids have the time for that pursuit, Demitu and Hussein are shouldering all the work other parents in rural Ethiopia might require their offspring to do. Two of their children have already finished 10^th grade and taken national exams; two others are now in 10^th grade; and one is in fourth grade. Read the rest of this entry »

Once again I am grateful for Duncan Green’s excellent blog “From Poverty to Power” for raising the issue of global population growth, which generated a lively debate when I blogged about it earlier this year. This time Green references a fascinating lecture by Hans Rosling. You can watch the video below, in which Rosling uses plastic storage boxes from Ikea (Rosling is Swedish so I suppose this makes sense) and an animated PowerPoint presentation to show how helping with basic needs reduces child mortality and encourages people to have fewer children. His basic message: If you want to address population growth, work on eradicating poverty. It’s a clear-eyed analysis of the population issue and basic development, all in about 10 minutes:

Severe deforestation is one of the underlying causes of poverty in Haiti. Photo by Abbie Trayler-Smith/Oxfam.

The earth was still shaking in Haiti when the questions started. Among the toughest and most important: Just why is Haiti the poorest country in the western hemisphere?

Economist Tyler Cowen offers a few theories in his blog Marginal Revolution. (Thanks to Yale economist Chris Blattman for the reference.) Cowen proposes the historic (premature independence), financial (huge debt to France that took 100 years to pay off following the revolution), agricultural (ways of growing coffee and sugar cane).  And of course, there is the political (the Duvalier clan wrecked Haiti). Cowen concludes that he is not particularly satisfied with any of these reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

We will need to make a significant commitment to address poverty in Haiti lest we simply reconstruct the conditions of poverty already there before the earthquake. Photo by Jeff Antebi.

We are privileged here at Oxfam America to have some photography from Haiti taken by photojournalist (and music producer) Jeff Antebi last year, so we are incorporating his images in an audio slide show on our web site. Please have a look and a listen, the images show how poor people are working to survive in Haiti, and the audio explains some of the particular challenges they face every day.

Recovering from Tuesday’s earthquake in Haiti will not be easy. We are going to have to take a hard look at what it will take to address the chronic level of pre-earthquake poverty in Haiti, instead of simply rebuilding what was already there.

Those inclined to help can contribute to our Haiti Earthquake Response Fund. If you have already donated, we thank you and ask you to share this url with others willing to help the people of Haiti:

Oxfam America Haiti Earthquake Response Fund: https://secure.oxfamamerica.org/site/Donation2?df_id=3560&3560.donation=form1

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by Ceerwan Aziz

This is Jameela.

She’s featured in a new report Oxfam has just published on the challenges facing women in Iraq today—challenges that have plunged many of them, including those widowed by the war, deep into poverty. “In Her Own Words” is the name of the report.  But words hardly begin to capture all that Jameela’s face conveys.

I print out her portrait and study it.

She’s 50. Only 50.

Two years younger than me? How could that be? Read the rest of this entry »