Photo by Kenny Rae / Oxfam America

In February I spent three days in Gaza witnessing firsthand how a bombing campaign and land invasion have affected children there. In Beit Lahiya I watched a girl, perhaps 5 years old, pick through the rubble of what must have been her house. She pulled out–then triumphantly held up–a battered stuffed toy to show her two older brothers.

I passed a school in Beit Lahiya that had been shelled. From the street all that was visible was a neat hole, perhaps 5 feet in diameter. By walking into the school yard, I saw that the shell had exploded inside the building, blowing out the walls of six classrooms. Why had this happened? I saw none of the tell tale signs of fighting between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers: no pock marks from bullets on the walls; no cartridge casings on the ground. Just the gaping hole where a single shell had been fired into the building and the destruction that resulted from it. Where would children in this neighborhood go to school now?

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Natalie Bergeron, a lifelong bayou resident, has been delivering mail down in Cocodrie, Louisiana, for 30 years. She knows just about everybody in the water-logged town, which was battered by wind from Hurricane Gustav and then swamped by the storm surge from Hurricane Ike. And what she knows about them—and plenty of others along the road from Bourg through Chauvin and into Cocodrie—is worrying her.

“Not only do we have poor people trying to live, we’ve lost four factories in Chauvin. One was a huge shrimp processing factory. Gustav tore it apart,” she said over the phone as she ate her lunch. It was 2 p.m., and the first occasion she’d found that day for a meal break. Things have been busy at Bayou Grace, the community services organization in Chauvin where Bergeron works, since the storms swept through, knocking out water and power supplies. Bayou Grace is one of the local organizations Oxfam America partners with.

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Three years ago in Biloxi, Miississippi, Oxfam America made an unusual grant following Hurricane Katrina. We gave Hands On, a group that mobilizes volunteers to undertake cleanup and rebuilding, money to purchase a mini excavator.

FEMA had claimed that it could not deliver desperately needed trailers to those who’d lost their houses until their yards were cleared of debris. Fifty Hands On volunteers were working from dawn until dusk cutting trees and moving rubble to facilitate this.  The addition of the excavator eased their work considerably, speeding the cleanup and denying FEMA an excuse for delays in delivery of the trailers.
In the days following Katrina, Oxfam America worked with Bill Stallworth, the city councilor for East Biloxi, to set up a coordination center that would serve as the focal point of those arriving to help with relief and reconstruction.

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The atmosphere in the Gumbo Shop, a long-established restaurant in New Orleans’ French Quarter, was celebratory. And so it should be. The city, so traumatized by Hurricane Katrina three years ago had, despite dire predictions, been spared the wrath of Hurricane Gustav, which had veered westward before making landfall. The whole city had evacuated, but now people were coming back, and getting on with their lives again.

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Sitting and shading ourselves from the sun on a 100-plus degree afternoon, my Oxfam colleagues and I learned from a group of local women about life on Char Shaper, the Bangla name for Snake Island. The sandy island sits in the middle of the Brahmaputra River, also called the Jamuna, which in April meanders as gently as the Charles River in Boston.

But in July, things change dramatically with this river as it fills with snow melt from the Himalayas. Families have to pack up their belongings and head to higher ground before the flood water envelops them. As many as a million people live on islands like this one. They are among the country’s poorest citizens, eking out a living by catching small river fish and planting groundnuts, chilies, and corn. Read the rest of this entry »