Oxfam America Blog

Since writing about President Obama’s speech in Ghana I have continued to see many fascinating comments about it rolling around the internet. The AfricaFocus web site has organized several reactions from Africa that are critical and very revealing. If you want some perspective on how Africans perceive their own challenges, and how they are reacting to the speech, check it out. Particularly notable are comments about how the US has failed to acknowledge its role in supporting dictators, influencing political transitions, and supporting conflicts during the Cold War. Firoz Manji of Pambazuka News noted this in a clever, alternative version of Obama’s speech called “Obama in Ghana: The speech he might have made.”

Trade came up in an editorial in Public Agenda in Accra, Ghana, which pointed out that “if the developed countries would open just three percent of their markets to African countries, these countries would earn more income from exports trade than the total foreign aid doled out to them in any given year. Mr. Obama shied away from the controversial issue of US farm subsidies which is killing small scale farmers, especially cotton farmers in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.” Oxfam has been pointing this fact out for years, so it was good to see that the idea about trade and subsidies are still relevant, especially to Africans who have so much to gain from trade.

So what are your reactions to Obama’s speech? And if you could rewrite it as Manji did, what would you say?

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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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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Photo by Ceerwan Aziz

This is Jameela.

She’s featured in a new report Oxfam has just published on the challenges facing women in Iraq today—challenges that have plunged many of them, including those widowed by the war, deep into poverty. “In Her Own Words” is the name of the report.  But words hardly begin to capture all that Jameela’s face conveys.

I print out her portrait and study it.

She’s 50. Only 50.

Two years younger than me? How could that be? Read the rest of this entry »

A boy in Beit Zaitoun is framed by a hole made in his house during the conflict. Photo: Kenny Rae / Oxfam America

This morning I read a powerful essay by Oxfam Great Britain’s Michael Bailey. Reporting back from Gaza during the tenuous ceasefire, Bailey gives a firsthand view of the consequences of war:

Gaza is a small place.  Three weeks of Israeli bombardment and battling with Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups on the ground has left its mark everywhere I look.  On the way south from the Erez crossing to Gaza, I pass through Ezbet Abed Rabou.  Here every house has been reduced to a pile of broken concrete.  Coloured towels, blankets, carpets and mattresses sandwiched between tons of flat grey slabs. The bright paint of bedroom walls exposed to public stare. 

An old man brews tea on a wood fire outside his personal mound of rubble.  “Yes,” he says, “Hamas gave me money and Oxfam gave me water and the UN gave me food.  I don’t want any of it, I want my house back.”

Amidst this devastation, Bailey says what worries him most is the way that civilians on both sides have become caught up in the conflict, seeing themselves as its intended targets:

I am still struggling to explain the devastation I have seen. Palestinian civilians I talk to in Gaza feel they were the focus of the Israeli military offensive.  Israeli civilians in Sderot feel they are the target of rockets from Gaza. 

Read Bailey’s full essay here–then come back and tell us what you think.

There are a few things we don’t talk about in my family. And one of them is the situation in Israel and Palestine.

It all started with an argument with my dad a few years ago. My dad is an open-minded guy, good-humored, always willing to help others, and able to see both sides of any issue. As I grow older, I see how his values of tolerance and service have shaped my own personal beliefs. These days, we often talk about politics, and we almost always see eye to eye.

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