Photo: Kenny Rae / Oxfam America

This morning I saw an intriguing note from my Oxfam colleague Liz Lucas about yesterday’s post on Lens, The New York Times’ blog on photography, video, and visual journalism. “The picture on this blog is unbelievably beautiful,” Liz wrote. “Check out the photo and the forum debating whether photos of suffering constitute art.”

I should say that, although the written word is my medium, I’m a huge photography fan. I can spend hours exploring the hidden treasures on photo sharing sites like Flickr. Though I try to observe the details around me, I find that photos (even my own) often show me things that I’ve never noticed before.

The picture Liz was writing about is no exception. Taken by AP photographer Emilio Moranatti, it centers on a young boy sleeping soundly among the soft, misty folds of a mosquito net. The moment seems like a tranquil one, hushed and comfortable–until you read the caption and learn that the boy is a displaced person, living in a refugee camp outside Peshawar, Pakistan.  

Moranatti’s photo made me think of another image of a young boy, perched in the wreckage of a bombed-out building in Gaza, cheerfully eating a piece of bread. This photo, taken by my colleague Kenny Rae, was featured on our Oxfam blog in February, and was recently named a finalist in InterAction’s 7^th Annual NGO photo contest.

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Godfried Ofori, a member of the Concerned Citizens Association of Prestea, Ghana, looks out over an open pit at the Bogoso/Prestea gold mine. Photo: Jane Hahn / Oxfam America

Riding in the back of a taxi the other night, I heard a BBC news story that sounded strangely familiar. After a lawsuit that dragged on for 13 years, the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell agreed to pay a $15.5 million settlement to Nigerian families as compensation for its alleged complicity in past human rights abuses, including the 1994 execution of local leaders who spoke out for the rights of people affected by the oil industry.

The company denied any wrongdoing, but said it welcomed the settlement as part of “a process of reconciliation.” Meanwhile, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs hailed the outcome as a message that “corporations, like individuals, must abide by internationally-recognized human rights standards.” (The case made it all the way to the US courts, based on an old law that allows international human rights cases to be tried here.)

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So I’ve finally taken the plunge: I joined Twitter.

People join Twitter every day, of course, but for me the decision had a special significance. Back in April I blogged about the risks of Twitter and what those could mean for Oxfam; my post generated lots of responses, both online and in person.

Oxfam America has had our own Twitter feed for a while now, and it’s definitely helped us get the word out. (Ironically enough, a few readers mentioned that Twitter was actually where they found my blog post.) But I had, and still have, some real reservations about it. As a writer, I worry about the erosion of language and all its power and nuance. As a communicator for social justice, I fear the abbreviated form could also mean the end of in-depth storytelling as we know it. So in some ways, joining Twitter–even though I did so for personal, not Oxfam-related, reasons–felt like a surrender.

However, I admit that I might possibly, just maybe, could have overreacted.

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Did you know that “global warming” is too depressing to talk about these days? Yep, it’s true. Instead,  we can call it “our deteriorating atmosphere,” like it’s a beloved old relative who’s begun the unavoidable aging process. And “energy efficiency” just sounds scary. Instead, it’s all about “saving money for a more prosperous future.”

In the Carteret Islands, Papua New Guinea, a rise in sea level is cutting off people’s supplies of fresh water and fertile land. The islands’ residents will be among the first people to be forced to migrate due to climate change. Photo: Toby Parkinson / Oxfam

While we’re at it, there’s got to be a more upbeat way to talk about people in the world’s most vulnerable communities, who bear the brunt of the effects of climate change. Instead of poor, perhaps we could call them “those of lesser wealth.”  And the Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea, whose homes are disappearing due to rising sea levels? They’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time–or in other words, “locationally challenged.”

OK, so I made up the last couple of examples. But the first two come from a very real recent attempt to re-brand climate change to make it more palatable to the public.

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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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Oxfam : ) Poverty : (

That’s what I told my colleague Tim our new tagline will be before long. And while it’s not quite that bad yet, I wasn’t completely joking.

It all started with a conversation about Twitter, which, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is an important new communications tool. Over nine million people are actively tweeting these days; I’ve seen that little blue logo popping up everywhere of late, on website I visit, on blogs I read, and even on ads.

And NGOs aren’t exempt from the frenzy. Oxfam America has our own Twitter feed, which recently reached our goal of 1,000 followers. Almost overnight, this condensed, gibberish-ridden, 140-character limit medium–which I thought would be only a passing fad–has become one of the fastest-growing ways for people to hear about our work.

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