Oxfam America Blog

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 »

After the quake in Chile. Photo by Victor Ruiz Caballero/Reuters, courtesy of Alertnet.

There’s a tendency to compare disasters, and I am sure many of us started to do that Saturday morning when we heard about the 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile. Another earthquake! Is it like the one in Haiti?

The answer is of course no, Chile is a completely different place. Although the earthquake was a significantly stronger (something like 500 times stronger than the 12 January Haiti quake, if that is even possible), it hit a much less densely populated area with a government equipped with resources to respond.

I immediately remembered an article on the BBC web site I read two days after the now infamous Port-au-Prince quake last month. It attempted something incredibly difficult: comparing the relative size, death toll, economic impact, proximity to urban areas and the poverty and population density in affected areas of three earthquakes in China (2008), Italy (2009) and Haiti (2010). Read the rest of this entry »

 Listen to The Breeders, “We’re Gonna Rise”:

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“Let me know if you need anything!”

During the course of my work sharing information about Oxfam, I hear that sentence so often that it’s almost become a generic sort of “goodbye”. Kind of a nicer way of saying “see you later.” It’s because Oxfam supporters in the music industry seem to be extra generous when it comes to making sure we are able to use their voices, and sometimes their art, to help with our work.

On Thanksgiving Eve last year, I had the amazing fortune of being able to see one of my favorite bands, The Pixies, play their famed “Doolittle” album from start to finish at NYC’s Hammerstein Ballroom. The Breeders, the band led by Pixie Kim Deal and her sister Kelley, are Oxfam supporters, most recently helping Oxfam volunteers host informational tables on the extensive tour to support their “Mountain Battles” album.

Kim (left) and Kelley Deal

Kelley invited me to watch The Pixies’s set from the side of the stage with her (which to a huge fan like me was akin to winning the lottery), and afterward I was able to spend some time with Kelley and Kim, talking about Oxfam’s work around the world, the recent Rankin photo exhibit from the Congo, and even a lively discussion about where to get the best cupcakes in Manhattan.

As the evening ended and we all hit the street outside the venue to part ways, Kelley yelled to me, “Let us know if you need anything!”

Little did she and I know that I’d be calling in that favor quicker than hoped.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stephan Durogene, left, helps distribute goods at a camp at Delmas 62. Photo by Kenny Rae/Oxfam America

Read part one.

Together with Jennifer Banessa Destine and a few other young adults, Stephan Durogene formed a committee to begin lobbying for aid for families who had taken refuge inside a once-private compound at Delmas 62. By day, 300 people were squeezed together under a few tarps and ropes draped with bed sheets. But at night, the numbers soared to 1,000.

“I just wanted to help people out,” said Durogene, who knew that aid organizations would be flooding into the city and could provide assistance. “People don’t know where to go, so I decided to go forward.” Read the rest of this entry »