Abdullah Ahmed Ali, 59, helps construct latrines. Photo by Oxfam.

Guest blog: Janna Hamilton, Media Coordinator for Oxfam, is reporting from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya. Oxfam is hiring camp residents to help build latrines and other work, which is helping provide services to more refugees and enabling workers earn a little money.

Abdullah Ahmed Ali, 59, has worked with Oxfam for four days, helping to construct latrines in the Ifo extension camp, part of the rapidly expanding Dadaab camp in eastern Kenya. More than 200 families are relocating to Ifo extension each day. Oxfam is scaling up its operations in order to meet the increasing demands for access to safe water and sanitation to prevent the spread of disease.

Cash-for-work initiatives offer the refugee community an opportunity to earn an income. It also helps reinforce some dignity for the workers, knowing they are helping to provide for their family. Men and women are paid between 250 and 500 Kenyan shillings (about $2.70 to $5.40) per day depending on their skill levels. Jobs for men include constructing latrines, reporting on dead livestock so they can be removed before spreading disease, and clearing new land for relocated families. Oxfam has employed women to help collect and dispose of the piles of packaging discarded from newly erected tents and materials.

Abdullah says the money he earns from Oxfam helps him to buy more food for his family of nine.

“In the camp we don’t get any sugar or vegetables, so the income I gain will be spent on buying more variety of food for my family.

“Without this job I would just be wandering around looking for any work.”

Guest blog: Janna Hamilton, Media Coordinator for Oxfam, is reporting from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya. There are an estimated 1,500 people moving in to the camp every day, and the camp is expanding to accommodate them.

Suban Ibrahim Kusow and her family moved from the outskirts of the refugee camp five nights earlier, where they had lived in a makeshift tent for two months since making the journey across the border from Somalia. Suban’s family is one of 200 that are relocating each day to a newly-cleared area of Ifo camp, known as the Ifo extension.

Oxfam is supplying clean, safe water and sanitation for people located in the outskirts as well as Ifo extension; building communal toilets, drilling wells and installing tanks, pipes, and tap stands

“I’m so happy to have water for drinking and washing, it makes everything clean and my children’s health will be OK when they drink it.”

“[In Somalia] we had no clean water, there were a lot of problems without it.”

“When my children drank the dirty water they had very bad diarrhea and vomiting, but now that we’re here they’re much better.”

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—and why. In this third and last audio and photo blog, the familiar becomes strange and he finds beauty at every turn:

Watch Part I.

Watch Part II.

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 this second audio and photo blog, he visits some of the communities in Ghana affected by large mining operations, and meets local people who are speaking out about it:

Watch part I.

Villagers collect water from a rain-fed pond behind a new dam built to provide them with a reliable source. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

Even as young teenager, Astbha Abraha knew there was only one way he could make a better life for himself and that was with an education. An interpreter, he told me the story of that schooling (see Part I) as we trundled in a truck through Tigray, Ethiopia’s northernmost region, on our way to the Raya Azebo district to visit a dam—one that holds a whole lot more than just water.

A remote place of rocky hills and plains, some of the district’s villages have been plagued by lack of water, and in 2008, the situation in Boye Gararsa became critical when rains failed to come, triggering acute food and water shortages—conditions Abraha knew well from his own childhood in Tigray. Together with the government and a local partner, the Women’s Association of Tigray, Oxfam America helped respond to the villages’ needs with a solution intended to solve the water problem for good: a micro dam. Read the rest of this entry »

Galgalo Boru is a herder who also depends in rain-fed fields to feed his family. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America

It’s been years since the grasses of Deed Liben grew tall, ensuring a safe haven for wildlife and abundant nutrition for the herds of cattle and goats that families in the Guji zone of southern Ethiopia depend on for food and income. In a handful of places, preservation efforts have restored some of this renowned pastureland, but for many people, including Galgalo Boru, making a living by herding alone is no longer an option here.

Late one afternoon, as sheets of rain and sunshine washed the plain, he sat by the side of the road, a few cows behind him munching shoots of green the rain had coaxed from the ground. He was alone and contemplating the five hectares of wheat and haricot beans he had planted recently on the far side of the road. Some of it had sprouted—slivers of possibility pushing through the red earth—but so much depends on what comes next: sun that scorches or clouds that cool and bring rain?

Boru could only hope.

“I am a pastoralist,” he said. “But I lost many animals and now I am farming. Now, I don’t have animals except for a pair of oxen and a donkey.”

The rain came late to this region, and the dry days, seemingly endless, put severe stress on families and their animals. In the last month alone eight of Boru’s precious herd died, including six lactating cows and an ox. Weak and hungry from drought, most of them collapsed in the cold rain.

The pattern is hardly new—though climate change may be exacerbating it—and it’s one of the realities of this hardscrabble region that is pushing herding families to find new ways of making a living. Some are now turning to farming; some, like Boru, have long combined the cultivation of small plots with the care of livestock. With rain so unpredictable, however, there is an ongoing debate about the wisdom of encouraging agriculture here, and across the sweep of southern Ethiopia’s pasturelands. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

It’s official this week: the southern region of Sudan will secede from the north and form the world’s newest nation.

When I read the news out of Sudan, I always wonder how the latest events are affecting the people I’ve had a chance to get to know on my visits to Darfur. 

Maryam Gado’s daughter holds the hand of a public health promoter. Photo by Elizabeth Stevens/Oxfam.

Read the rest of this entry »

Oxfam's Elie Saint-Cyr talks to villagers about chlorinating water. Photo by Toby Adamson/Oxfam

Sophie Martin Simpson is an Oxfam monitoring and evaluation officer in Haiti. She wrote this account after a visit to Artibonite province, where Oxfamis working hard to stem the spread of cholera.

I recently returned from two days with our cholera response team in the region of Petit Riviere in Artibonite. I was there to support our team and to collect information from the local population about existing water sources, their access to basic hygiene facilities such as showers and latrines, and their knowledge about cholera and cholera prevention. The first cases of cholera were reported in Artibonite in October and the region continues to be one of the worst hit by the outbreak. As such, it is a focus for Oxfam’s cholera response.

I visited rural communities and talked with people, some of whom proudly showed me their newly constructed family latrines. Before Oxfam began its cholera response program, the majority of communities lacked toilet facilities.

In a number of locations, Oxfam has additionally set up ORS (oral rehydration solution) “corners“ ORS is the most effective way to keep people with cholera hydrated until the cholera-causing bacteria has passed through the body. Community volunteers, trained in treating water to ensure it is safe to drink, in hand-washing practices, and in ORS preparation, staff these sites. If community members suspect they have cholera, they can get instant assistance from the corner volunteer who supplies them with enough ORS and clean water to ensure they stay hydrated on their journey to hospital. Oxfam staffers carry out regular spot checks of these corners to ensure the quality of the treated water and that ORS is being prepared correctly. Read the rest of this entry »

Men use a hand auger to drill a well in Haiti. Photo by Tom Mahin/Oxfam

Tom Mahin, a drinking water specialist, flew to Haiti recently to help Oxfam stem the spread of a cholera outbreak that has now reached every province of the country. Here, he recounts some of the challenges of that work.

 

 

 

I arrived a few days ago in the Artibonite Valley in Haiti to work with Oxfam on its response to the cholera outbreak. My focus is on drinking water. The valley is much different than Port-au-Prince where I worked for Oxfam for five weeks after the January 2010 earthquake. Here, it is greener and much less congested, but the valley is also where the cholera outbreak has been the worst. Lack of adequate safe drinking water in villages is a major problem for people, now even more so because of the cholera outbreak.

One of my first tasks was to accompany an Oxfam public health engineer to sites selected for some new wells to provide safe drinking water—key to preventing the spread of cholera– and to see the drilling of wells underway. Oxfam has contracted with two local drilling companies to do the work. The companies don’t rely on expensive drilling rigs: They mostly use hand augers, though sometimes workers dig the wells by hand because rocks make the use of augers impossible.  Read the rest of this entry »