Oxfam America Blog

I just wanted to share this striking photo from a slideshow related to The Cost of War, a new Oxfam report documenting the human cost of chronic conflict and disorder in Afghanistan. Taken by Travis Beard, it shows women shopping for new burqas in a bazaar in Herat.

At first glance, I thought it was a beautiful image, the stiff folds of fabric falling like drapes in a Renaissance painting. Then I read a little more about women’s experiences in Afghanistan under extremist rule, and the more haunting elements—the cold blue light, the claustrophobic space, the bent and faceless figures—came to the forefront.

When the Taliban came to power, most Afghan women were banned from work and not allowed to leave home without a male escort and a full-length burqa. These draconian laws left many women considering suicide.

“During the Taliban period, our life was bad, because we didn’t have the freedom to go outside,” said one Kandahar woman. According to the report, 42 percent of women surveyed in Kabul now meet the conditions for post-traumatic stress disorder.

More than 700 Afghan people spoke to Oxfam and partners about their experiences for the report. Check out more of their photos and stories in our new slideshow, Lives Interrupted.

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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Flood waters swamped Gabura in Bangladesh after Cyclone Aila hit. Photo by EPA/Abir Abdullah

When Cyclone Aila hit the coast of Bangladesh on Monday, reportedly killing at least 89 people, one of the first things I thought about was the 400 storm-resistant homes Oxfam helped to build following another devastating cyclone one and a half years ago. Did the houses hold up? Read the rest of this entry »

In Thiraimadu camp, Sri Lanka,Yealini, holds her one-year-old baby, Rohith. They stand outside their post-tsunami transitional shelter. Photo by: Howard Davies/Oxfam.

I’ve been thinking a lot about heritage lately. My husband, John, and I are expecting our first child in about a week. John’s a New Englander, who traces his roots back to various European intersections, but not one that he identifies with in particular. I’m from California, the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants.

Everyone we know is fascinated by the sort of child the two of us would produce; the fact that we’ve decided not to find out the gender just makes it all the more intriguing. Will the baby have my South Asian features – big eyes, dark hair, caramel coloring – or will he or she have my mother-in-law’s trademark heart-shaped face, almond eyes, and long lashes. Could it be the “perfect baby” (someone actually said this to me once) and be a lovely cross of both?

And since it will be a biracial child, how will we make sure he or she has some connection to its roots? Read the rest of this entry »

Oxfam launched this message for ministers meeting in The Hague. Photo by Ton Vrijenhoek

When dozens of ministers from countries around the world met in The Hague yesterday to talk about the future of Afghanistan, the fate of 8.5 million people hung in the air. That’s the number of Afghans who face chronic uncertainty about whether they will have enough to eat. Already the health of more than a million young children and 500,000 women is at risk because of malnutrition.

Those numbers hit hard when you weigh them against the findings in a new field report from Afghanistan produced by Oxfam America. The report says that the US spends 20 times more in military activities and operations in the country than it does on development. And the money that does go to development isn’t always well coordinated:  The report cited one case of two separate contractors, both funded by USAID who, by chance, discovered they were doing almost the same project in the same place. Read the rest of this entry »

Equipped with cameras and a quick lesson on how to use them, 20 Afghan women and their children fanned out to record their lives last year in a project sponsored by Oxfam and its partner, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief. The images they captured—and the words they used to describe them—are filling my mind now as I read about a high-level  meeting on the future of Afghanistan that’s set to take place tomorrow in The Hague. Read the rest of this entry »

Sahera begins her morning duties as a rag-picker in Lucknow, India, where Oxfam funds a school and health programs for working children. According to Peter Singer, kids—in India and elsewhere—are one of the groups most at risk from poverty-related diseases. Photo: Tom Pietrasik / Oxfam

When I visited my hometown of Bombay, India, last month, I found myself trapped in complex moral dilemmas, even as I went through the motions of everyday life. There, the urban poor live smashed up against a growing affluent class. Despair, hunger, and homelessness rest uneasily side-by-side with designer boutiques and Western-inspired malls.

I remember tightly clutching my ice cream cone on a crowded commuter train, the sticky cream melting down my wrist in the midday heat. But how could I eat it when a little boy stared at me, wide-eyed, hungry, and begging for spare change?

Back home in Boston, I attended a reading last week by the author Peter Singer. Singer, the renowned and prolific Princeton bioethicist, has championed animal rights and written passionately about the ethics of giving. His new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, posits the moral argument that each one of us has the power to make a difference in the fight against poverty.

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