In Fenadesal Sur, El Salvador, disaster preparedness is incorporated into a game of hopscotch. Photo by Claudia Barrientos

“Flooding…houses collapsed…community committee activated….evacuation…meeting point…shelter!”

On the hot pavement in the center of Fenadesal Sur, children lined up for a game of hopscotch, only this one had a twist: each time they paused to jump forward, they called out the next step in a journey from disaster to safety.

If their legs wobbled a little on the one-footed hops, their voices didn’t: the children knew the sequence by heart. In fact, some of them had lived it. When the rains of November 2009 swelled the river Acelhuate, more than 100 houses in this community were damaged, and 30 were destroyed. Many of these children lost their homes and are now living in a nearby shelter. Read the rest of this entry »

A prayer vigil in support of restaurant workers was held recently in front of Tony Moran's Restaurant in New Oleans.

Oxfam America’s Andrew Blejwas reports on the findings of a new study on the disparities restaurant workers face.

Finding good food in New Orleans is like catching a string of beads during Mardi Gras: stand in the right place and it’s likely to hit you in the face. From Creole to Cajun—and everything in between—the city’s food is as diverse and interesting as its population. And just as New Orleans’s food mirrors the diversity of American culture, the conditions facing restaurant staff in the city reflect American disparities broadly.

A new series of reports, Behind the Kitchen Door, outlines the dramatic racial, gender, and economic disparity among workers in Orleans and four other American cities: Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Portland, Maine. The reports are by the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), an Oxfam America partner in New Orleans. Based on surveys of more than 2,500 workers, the reports reveal two main findings, according to Jose Oliva, ROC’s national policy coordinator: “One, the restaurant industry is resilient, even in the face of this Great Recession. The other is that these are not the kind of jobs we want to have in America when we come out of the recession.”

The reports reveal a number of startling figures about the jobs that are available: Read the rest of this entry »

Paula Deperla (center) meets with emergency committee members about evacuation routes in Santa Eduviges, El Salvador. Credit: Claudia Barrientos

Elizabeth Stevens is just back from El Salvador, where she was visiting communities affected by severe flooding and landslides brought on by Hurricane Ida in November 2009.

“We didn’t expect this emergency, but we were prepared,” said Paula Deperla.

Deperla is a member of a disaster-response committee trained by Comandos de Salvamento, an Oxfam partner in El Salvador. When heavy rains pounded the region in November, her team swung into action, knocking on doors and calling in the local authorities to assist.

The losses were heavy:  eight houses in their community were buried or badly damaged by landslides around the ravine, or barranco, that borders the neighborhood. It was thanks to the quick action of the committee that no one died. Read the rest of this entry »

Juana Francisca Garcia, 36, is the mother of two children, 10 and 13 years old. “We can’t live here anymore,” she told Oxfam after the storm last November. “The mud came above the windows, everything is destroyed." Photo: Luis Galdamez/Oxfam America

Elizabeth Stevens is in El Salvador, where she’s visiting communities affected by severe flooding and landslides brought on by Hurricane Ida in November. She’ll be blogging about the steps people have taken to prepare for storms.

I arrived in El Salvador last Thursday night, feeling as strange carrying a fleece jacket in the 80-degree heat as I did in Boston wearing flip-flops through the snow squall that ushered me to the airport earlier that day.

My job here is to meet with communities affected by a storm of incredible intensity that struck El Salvador’s central provinces last fall, where 14 inches of rain fell in just four hours. Trees and boulders went crashing down into mountain villages that day, and rivers suddenly grown deeper and wider and more powerful took out everything in their paths.

Back in November, we quickly learned the grim news of losses and death; not so well understood is what was saved.

For months—in some cases years—before the storm, Oxfam had been working with local partners and community leaders to prepare for emergencies like this one. But did the preparedness work? Did it reduce suffering and losses? Did it save lives? This week my Salvadoran colleagues and I are travelling around to some of the hardest-hit communities, listening to survivors tell their stories of what happened.

Read some of those stories here.

Tom Mahin, in blue shirt, helps set up a tapstand with five drinking faucets, which draws clean water from an Oxfam water bladder. Photo: Kenny Rae / Oxfam America

Oxfam humanitarian response specialist Kenny Rae is currently in Haiti working on the recovery effort. Here’s his latest blog from Port-au-Prince.

Six months ago, Tom Mahin’s focus was figuring out how to improve the quality of drinking water in the Massachusetts city of Gloucester, whose 30,000 residents had been told to boil their tap water before drinking it due to high levels of harmful bacteria.

Today his task, albeit on a smaller scale, is arguably more important: For the first time since the January 12 earthquake, 340 displaced families in Impasse Fouget, Port-au-Prince, have safe drinking water, thanks to Mahin and Haitian engineer Donald St. Preux. Mahin is a drinking water specialist with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and is working as an advisor to Oxfam America in Haiti.

Because of the urgent need, we chose this spontaneous camp to be the first to receive one of the 10 bladders—they look like big rubber pillows that hold about 2,900 gallons of water—that just arrived. Until now the 1,482 people in this densely populated location close to the city center were venturing out as far as a kilometer for drinking water.

Oxfam’s job is not only to provide water, but to ensure its quality, all with the participation of the people who will be drinking it.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Rev. Jean-Jacques Frederic helped organize a camp for displaced people.

Raymond C. Offenheiser, Oxfam America’s president, recounts his impressions of the ravaged Haitian capital after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the city leaving 230,000 people dead and more than one million others homeless.

I arrived in Port-au-Prince on the one-month anniversary of the ghastly earthquake that rocked Haiti to its core.  The airport was hectic, full of UN officials, aid workers and military personnel frantically working to move goods and people, struggling to coordinate and manage their own stress in face of the monumental task that confronted them. 

As we left the airport, the scale of the tragedy unfolded: block after block of collapsed buildings and 500,000 people living in ramshackle shelters. Some had tents. Some had the familiar blue sheeting, and others had nothing more than bed sheets.  Disposable cups, plastic bags and every other kind of trash formed piles on the perimeter as overtaxed sanitation workers tried to manage the exploding scale of this human refuse. 

Much of this story has been told, but I was privileged to witness a new beginning.  An effort by an entire nation to confront and accept an unspeakable level of grief.  Read the rest of this entry »

Today we are sharing a new video about Cleofé Neyra, a farmer in Peru’s northern province of Piura. In 2005 she participated in a demonstration against an illegal mining exploration operation in an environmentally sensitive area of her community and was abducted and tortured, and eventually released after three days. She and the 27 others who survived this ordeal (one man died) asked the government to investigate the police and mine security officers allegedly involved and prosecute those responsible for these human rights violations. Instead, prosecutors charged the campesinos who organized the demonstration with terrorism.

There’s nothing like an unjust terrorism accusation to shut someone up, especially in Peru, but the government finally agreed to investigate more thoroughly when someone leaked photos taken of the detainees to Peru’s National Human Rights Coordinator. The images showed farmers bound, gagged, hooded, and in one case dead. The resulting report and publication of these photos brought some attention to this case. Read the rest of this entry »