Boulders litter Verapaz, El Salvador, following heavy rains that triggered landslides last weekend. Photo by Tjarda Muller
Oxfam America’s Tjarda Muller lives in El Salvador where torrential rains last weekend caused widespread damage. She visited one of the hardest-hit communities, Verapaz, yesterday. Listen to her report: VoiceMessage1
Corn will be in short supply this winter in many indigenous communities in Baja Verapaz. Photo by James Rodriguez/Oxfam America
As promised, here is an update on Oxfam’s plan to help the people I met in Guatemala described in my last post: You can read about our work with Gloria Gonzalez’s organization ASECSA here.
It will take more than whatever rain fell from the recent passage of a tropical storm to turn around the super-dry conditions in Guatemala. Winter is essentially here, but hopefully next year, in the absence of the El Niño phenomenon, there will be better rains. If we can help these families survive the winter, they will need seeds and fertilizer so they can plant in the spring. With so many families facing food shortages this winter, they will require all their strength and resources to survive.
The resilience of Guatemalans is impressive. After all the wars, discrimination, and tragedy, the indigenous people keep fighting to survive, and they will not succumb to malnutrition without a struggle. Read the rest of this entry »
Mud and debris fill the streets of communities in El Salvador following days of heavy rain that triggered landslides and floods. Photo by CORDES
More than 100 people are dead in El Salvador following days of torrential rain that triggered floods and landslides. Over the weekend, the first emails hit from colleagues. Then wire service stories started showing up in newspapers around the country. This morning, I have spent the past hour emailing with my colleague Tjarda in San Salvador: Thousands of people have flocked to shelters. Some have seen their houses washed away by the raging waters, and many will return home to widespread damage.
It’s hard to fathom the devastation that rain can cause, but in a poor country where many of its seven million citizens live in precarious locations—in low-lying areas prone to flooding, or along steep hillsides whose fronts slip away when water-logged—the destruction can be sweeping.
And one of the worst consequences of flooding is the pollution of drinking water. Read the rest of this entry »
Medhin Reda depends on rain to water her fields of teff and corn. Erratic weather has a profound impact on the well-being of her family. Photo by Eva-Lotta Jansson/Oxfam America
Climate talks in Copenhagen are just a few weeks away. Here at my desk in Boston, I’m hearing a growing urgency in the pitches from campaigners who have been working long and hard to get the United States and the European Union to own up to their responsibility for the future that is facing us all.
But what I hear louder, still, are the voices of the people I met in Ethiopia in August for whom changing weather patterns and increased cycles of drought mean failed crops, skipped meals, and deeper poverty. Read the rest of this entry »
Farmer Maria Lopez says she has lost most of her corn and beans this year due to lack of rain. Photo by Chris Hufstader/oxfam America
It is hard for visitors to fathom the depths of the tragedy Guatemala’s indigenous people continue to suffer, but a brief look at the museum in Rabinal will certainly get the process started. It commemorates those who died in some of the worst massacres of indigenous people during this country’s 36-year civil conflict.
Gloria Gonzalez, a young program officer at a non-governmental group working in the area, showed me the museum. It consists of two rooms filled with photos of the dead, one of whom was her grandfather, Camilo Mayor. The caption under his photo says “assassinated during the conflict in our community.”
The community of Rio Negro was particularly affected: when they objected to the terms of a forced relocation to make way for the Chixoy River hydroelectric dam, the military claimed they were allied with guerrilla forces and killed nearly every resident between February and March 1982, part of its scorched earth counter-insurgency policy. More than 250 were murdered, including 177 unarmed elderly, women, and children on one day. The Guatemala Truth Commission declared the incident a state-sponsored act of genocide.
Today, the Maya-Achi indigenous people who were pushed up the mountain slopes to make room for the Chixoy Dam are suffering a slow-motion type of disaster, no less deadly. The centuries of racism and discrimination that led to their precarious living conditions are now exacerbated by a long drought and high temperatures that have left most with little corn, beans, and other crops on which they depend. Read the rest of this entry »
Terraces around the village of Ashenge have been built to help conserve the soil. Photo by Marc Cohen/Oxfam America
Marc Cohen is Oxfam America’s senior researcher on humanitarian policy and climate change. Here’s his account of a recent visit to northern Ethiopia where famine struck a quarter century ago.
Twenty-five years ago, Michael Buerk’s dramatic BBC footage from Korem, in northern Ethiopia, brought a devastating famine to the world’s attention. Tens of thousands of people had sought refuge from war and drought in the town. Every 20 minutes, a camp resident died from hunger and related diseases. Buerk called Korem “the closest thing to hell on earth.”
Last year, I traveled to Korem while working on a research project about decentralization in Ethiopia and how that affects men and women farmers’ access to services. My colleagues and I arrived in the town just as the regional Orthodox Christian patriarch was inaugurating a large new church; hundreds of people had turned out for the colorful ceremony. This celebration was a big contrast with the grim images of 1984.
But it was a meeting with Merzeneb Firkado—her first name means “honey from heaven”—that made me realize how much has changed for people in the Korem area since that terrible period. Read the rest of this entry »
Andrew Blejwas is Oxfam’s regional communications officer for the US.
When I first moved to Alabama five years ago, just about all I knew about the state was that it was hot, and Montgomery was known as both the cradle of the Confederacy and the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement. But mostly, it was hot. So last week when we had what amounted to a cold snap—about three days of weather in the 50s—conversations usually started with some variation on the theme of global warming: “So much for global warming,” someone would say. Or, “We really could use some of that global warming about now.”
If only it were that easy to turn global warming on and off like a switch. For a lot of us, global warming is a euphemism for climate change, something we don’t fully understand, something happening somewhere else—certainly “not in my backyard.” Even in sweltering Alabama, we don’t talk about global warming until it gets cold. But climate change is happening, and it is in our backyard.
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