In Fenadesal Sur, El Salvador, disaster preparedness is incorporated into a game of hopscotch. Photo by Claudia Barrientos

“Flooding…houses collapsed…community committee activated….evacuation…meeting point…shelter!”

On the hot pavement in the center of Fenadesal Sur, children lined up for a game of hopscotch, only this one had a twist: each time they paused to jump forward, they called out the next step in a journey from disaster to safety.

If their legs wobbled a little on the one-footed hops, their voices didn’t: the children knew the sequence by heart. In fact, some of them had lived it. When the rains of November 2009 swelled the river Acelhuate, more than 100 houses in this community were damaged, and 30 were destroyed. Many of these children lost their homes and are now living in a nearby shelter.

What they didn’t lose in Fenadesal was lives, and that, people seemed to agree, was thanks to the preparedness efforts of a few hard-working community members, trained and equipped by Oxfam and its partners.

When the children were done with their game they gathered around to talk. I explained that I had never lived through a disaster and asked what kind of advice they had for people like me. There was urgency in their voices as they told me not to be afraid and to stay by my mother’s side. One girl had another thought – that in emergencies we need each other.

“Knock on the doors of your neighbors,” she said, “and get away with them as fast as you can.”

A prayer vigil in support of restaurant workers was held recently in front of Tony Moran's Restaurant in New Oleans.

Oxfam America’s Andrew Blejwas reports on the findings of a new study on the disparities restaurant workers face.

Finding good food in New Orleans is like catching a string of beads during Mardi Gras: stand in the right place and it’s likely to hit you in the face. From Creole to Cajun—and everything in between—the city’s food is as diverse and interesting as its population. And just as New Orleans’s food mirrors the diversity of American culture, the conditions facing restaurant staff in the city reflect American disparities broadly.

A new series of reports, Behind the Kitchen Door, outlines the dramatic racial, gender, and economic disparity among workers in Orleans and four other American cities: Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Portland, Maine. The reports are by the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), an Oxfam America partner in New Orleans. Based on surveys of more than 2,500 workers, the reports reveal two main findings, according to Jose Oliva, ROC’s national policy coordinator: “One, the restaurant industry is resilient, even in the face of this Great Recession. The other is that these are not the kind of jobs we want to have in America when we come out of the recession.”

The reports reveal a number of startling figures about the jobs that are available:

• The median hourly wage for white workers is $12.33, versus $8.50 for African Americans.
• 60 percent of those who reported working overtime without compensation were people of color
• Women experience labor law violations almost three times as frequently as men
• 58 percent of all immigrant workers experienced labor law violations

And on and on and on.

It’s something many of us have seen and I suspect most of us acknowledge when we sit down at a nice restaurant where even the staff seems segregated. The “front of the house” with the wait staff is predominantly white while the “back of the house” with the cooks, dishwashers, and others is predominantly black.

These workplace disparities are something we grapple with in the US more broadly, which is why Oxfam has a decent work program focused on the US.

And these disparities are why Oxfam is encouraging support of ROC’s campaign for justice for restaurant workers. In New Orleans, the ROC campaign is supporting six workers who filed a lawsuit demanding back pay and fair treatment from Tony Moran’s restaurant, where they all worked. “We are asking the company to treat all workers with equity, dignity and respect,” said Van Joseph, who used to work at the restaurant. “It is critical that we improve the working conditions for ALL restaurant workers, and have a job that offers equal opportunity regardless of race.” 

Those interested in supporting the campaign can write a letter to restaurant management. The address is: Tony Moran’s Restaurant, 240 Bourbon Street, New Orleans, LA , 70130.

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.

Paula and her group led us down a steep hill to see the area that was most affected by the storm. The street was clean and wide at the top, paved with carefully laid stones and lined with sturdy houses of brick, concrete, and stucco. By the time we reached the bottom, rusty sheets of corrugated metal were standing in for many of the walls and roofs, and a steady stream of smelly gray water ran alongside the broken slabs of concrete that served as pavement.

Erosion has brought the edge of a deep ravine to the doorsteps of those who live in Santa Eduviges, El Salvador. Credit: Claudia Barrientos

The biggest shock happens when you step into one of these houses  and out the other side. Take five or ten steps—fewer each year—and you find yourself on the edge of a cliff, a vertical drop of hundreds of feet that is lengthening with every earthquake and every pounding rainstorm. An entire neighborhood sits on a finger of land jutting out into thin air—buffered from disaster by just a few feet of loosening soil.

It would be hard to find a more dramatic example of how poverty places people in harm’s way.

“We have very few resources,” said Maria Julia Garcia, whose children and grandchildren live on the rim of the barranco, “so it is hard to relocate by our own means.”

From Comandos, the disaster-response committee had learned techniques—how to staunch a wound, how to get people out of their homes and into shelters. But in the course of all that training, they learned something more fundamental: how to take matters into their own hands.
“We were not waiting for City Hall to tell us to do this or do that,” said Deperla. “We just did it.”

The committee, with Comandos by its side, is pressuring the government to find those resources and relocate the families at risk.

“It is important that the programs of Comandos keep going because we need them,” said  Deperla. “Because we don’t know what the future can bring.”

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.

At Impasse Fouget, our first task was to build a large platform with rubble, rocks, and earth on which the bladder could rest. A bladder like this filled with water weighs 10 tons, so the platform has to be well constructed–a task that community members took on, with no request for payment. A flexible pipe running to a set of five outdoor faucets carries the water from bladder down to where people can draw it.

Chlorinating water ensures its safety—and Oxfam works to reinforce that idea through hygiene promotion activities in the camps. When a delivery truck comes to fill the bladder, chlorine is added, a responsibility we have given to local users who have selected a water committee to carry it out. Mahin provides bottles of a one-percent chlorine solution (quite safe—household bleach is six percent) to a committee member who adds it to the bladder. An Oxfam engineer, working with the same handheld meter used by water authorities in the US, monitors the chlorine level to determine whether it’s appropriate, and can adjust the concentration if necessary.

Oxfam is working in camps of many sizes, from a few hundred people to many thousands. Our team’s focus is on 35 smaller encampments in the Delmas district. Between 200 and 2,100 people might reside in each. Working at this scale makes our community-based approach for chlorination effective.

A test of the water emerging from the tank at Impasse Fouget showed an acceptable residual chlorine level of 2 mg/liter–enough to ensure any bugs in the water would be killed, but not enough to be tasted except by the most sensitive palate.

Mahin’s with us for a couple of weeks, and by the time he returns to Boston he will have helped to bring safe water to more than12,000 people—almost half the number who live in Gloucester.

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. 

Around town, small churches overflowed with men in suits and ties, women in white dresses and their best hats, and preachers exhorting their faithful to sing, chant, grieve and embrace.  

At the Oxfam office, I met with colleagues who told me of the many dimensions of the humanitarian response taking place.  All the while, a small religious choir two doors down sang, and sang and sang.  Their rhythm set the tone for my entire afternoon and evening, never stopping for more than a few seconds.  Young voices led the call and a small organ provided a trace of a melody. 

It was hauntingly beautiful and seemed to provide the necessary inspiration for our Oxfam team. Not only had they lost two colleagues, but many of them had lost family and friends as well. Still, they did not stop to mourn.They carried on as they had since the minute the quake hit. 

At Our Lady of Perpetual Help parish the next morning, Father Fredrick told me that he was preparing to open the front door of his church for a 5 p.m. service when the quake struck.  While he was able to flee, another colleague froze in her tracks and did not make it to the door.  Like many heroes in Port-au-Prince, he immediately took over an empty lot across from the church and turned it into a gathering place for parishioners to find solace in the company of their neighbors.  In short order, they had organized a community group of 125 families, arranging shelter, water and hygiene services.  Families posted their names and new addresses on their makeshift shelters and began to cope with their new reality. 

At another small empty lot up the street, another 300 parishioners gathered around a woman who led them in prayer, reflection and singing.  Men, women and children swayed to the music with both hands over their heads.  As I surveyed the crowd, I was drawn to the sight of a solitary man, probably in his 70s, who stood alone away from the group, hands over his head, swaying in his own private space.   What was his loss, I wondered.  A wife of many years?  Children?  Grandchildren? 

Around the city, I witnessed community-wide efforts to come together to cope. But how can an entire nation that was struggling before the quake recover from such devastating collective trauma?  Is it possible for a country to go through a public and collective process of grief management?   

A Haitian psychologist told me about her efforts to initiate some trauma counseling with students at the university that is now a pile of rubble.  She told me that many students, laborers and friends she has worked with share the same experience of falling asleep thinking they are in a nightmare, hoping that when they wake up, things are back to what they were.  She confessed that this is happening to her as well.  She and her husband were still sleeping in the garden in front of their house.  Yet deep down, each of them knows it will not end.  It must be endured.

She believes that the experience of processing this trauma will be different for each person, given where they are in their lives and what resources they have.  But all of them will count on hope to keep them going.

On the last day of mourning, people took their grief to the streets in a show of renewal and life.   Everywhere you turned, there were processions of hundreds of people marching, singing, and waving leafy green branches.  Men in suits and ties, women in their finest, children in fluffy dresses of all colors.  Renaissance on the streets of Port-au-Prince.  The work goes on, but the healing has begun.

Today we are sharing a new video about Cleofé Neyra, a farmer in Peru’s northern province of Piura. In 2005 she participated in a demonstration against an illegal mining exploration operation in an environmentally sensitive area of her community and was abducted and tortured, and eventually released after three days. She and the 27 others who survived this ordeal (one man died) asked the government to investigate the police and mine security officers allegedly involved and prosecute those responsible for these human rights violations. Instead, prosecutors charged the campesinos who organized the demonstration with terrorism.

There’s nothing like an unjust terrorism accusation to shut someone up, especially in Peru, but the government finally agreed to investigate more thoroughly when someone leaked photos taken of the detainees to Peru’s National Human Rights Coordinator. The images showed farmers bound, gagged, hooded, and in one case dead. The resulting report and publication of these photos brought some attention to this case.

The events in Piura that Neyra describes in this video are horrifying. Unfortunately, there are plenty of other heinous acts committed in conflicts related to oil, gas, and mining projects. The worst actors in the mining industry, many operating in collaboration with governments, have been implicated in terrible human rights violations in Peru and other countries. I have spoken with people who have had their land taken for mining without proper compensation. I’ve met two people in Ghana who were shot (allegedly by accident, they were told) by mine security forces. People have been beaten, set upon by guard dogs, arrested and held in jails on flimsy, trumped-up charges, and threatened with death, rape, or attacks on close family members. Others say they have been poisoned by pollution from mines and oil drilling operations—usually difficult to prove, but no less deadly.

This can be a rather grim business, but the good news is that people are organizing to get some respect for their human rights, their property, and their communities. In many places it is hard to get the government, which is supposed to protect them, to do its duty, but Oxfam’s partners are making progress. They are making their case to government, working with the media to expose injustices, and holding companies and governments accountable.

There are things you can do to help this struggle: please get involved in our Right to Know, Right to Decide campaign. You can help us raise awareness, and push for legislation that will build accountability in the oil, gas, and mining industry.

Courageous people likeCleofé Neyra deserve at least that much.

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).

A key point in this article, from our perspective here at Oxfam:

“In places such as Haiti, where 72.1% of the population live on less than $2 a day, and in cities like Port-au-Prince, where many are housed in poor and densely-packed shantytowns and badly-constructed buildings, the devastation is always expected to be greater.”

The Haiti quake is making a much more significant impact on the country than the others because so much of the population was living in or near Port-au-Prince and was so severely affected, and it will have a much larger effect on the country’s economy.

It’s hard to make valid comparisons between such tragedies. But earthquakes have killed more people than any other disaster over the last 10 years, according to the Centre for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) in Belgium, as explained in an article on the UN’s IRIN new service. And an increasing proportion of those affected by earthquakes are in developing countries. So if we can use the data and lessons learned from these comparisons to focus on poverty, and its propensity to increase vulnerability to disaster, it is worth looking. It is yet another fact we can use to mobilize people and resources to end poverty, because it will also save lives.

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

“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.

After January’s devastating earthquake in Haiti, our friends at FILTER and American Eagle Outfitters proposed a benefit CD, with 100% of proceeds going toward Oxfam’s relief and recovery work. I knew immediately that it was important that the album featured artists that support our work, and one of the first calls I made was to Kelley Deal.

“When The Breeders were approached by Oxfam America, our first response was ‘yes’ and our second was ‘what do you need?’ That’s a good indicator of the kind of respect that Oxfam America has…especially to musicians and artists. We just take it for granted that whatever project they are involved with will be one of quality, and more importantly, will result in a direct impact,” Kelley says.

So, one of the first tracks submitted for the album was The Breeders’ stirring “We’re Gonna Rise” (streaming above), a song that features a chorus that seems to speak directly to the situation:

We’re gonna rise
the sun shines
we’re gonna rise
feel a light on my face

The album also features a remarkable line-up of what Consequence of Sound calls “basically a who’s who in indie rock”.  Check out a track listing below, and pick up a copy here:

01. Beck – “Volcano” (acoustic version)
02. Snow Patrol – “You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will.” (Bright Eyes cover)
03. Keane – “Black Burning Heart” (version français)
04. Air – “So Light Is Her Footfall” (Breakbot Remix)
05. Charlotte Gainsbourg – “Dandelion”
06. Julian Casablancas – “Long Island Blues”
07. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – “Am I Only” (Remix)
08. The Breeders – “We’re Gonna Rise”
09. Vampire Weekend – “Cousinz” (Toy Selectah Mex-More Remix)
10. Noah And The Whale- “Love of An Orchestra” (Chew Fu Fix)
11.  Camera Obscura – “The World is Full of Strangers”
12. Minus The Bear – “Broken China”
13. Of Montreal – “Take Me Out” (Live Cover Of Franz Ferdinand)
14. Busdriver – “Running Water”
15. Surfer Blood – “Take It Easy” (Drop the Lime Remix)
16. Grizzly Bear – “Boy From School”(Hot Chip cover)
17. AM – “Endings Are Beginnings” (Piano Mix)

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.”

The small committee visited every aid group it could reach, including Oxfam, whose office was about half a mile from the camp.

“I explained to them there are injuries. They don’t have water. They don’t have anything to eat,” recalled Durogene.  Sometimes, the committee went back to make its case a second time.

The persistence of the committee members paid off.

First they got water delivered to the site. Then, when it started to rain, they appealed for tarps, and got some of those, too. Deliveries of kitchen supplies—pots for cooking, utensils for eating–followed from Oxfam, with the committee organizing an orderly distribution the following day. And soon, Oxfam was also digging latrines at the site and setting up a more permanent water supply in the form of a large collapsible bladder.

“I always have a head on my shoulders and come with bright ideas,” said a matter-of-fact Destine, 29, about the role she plays as the only woman on the committee. And because she’s a clear-thinker (and studied management for four years at university), the others embrace her ideas—like the one about recording the names of each head of household and the numbers in each family so the committee can keep track of how many people are in the camp.

During the evenings, the committee also works to keep order in the camp.

“At night, when everybody is back and ready to go to sleep, I take the megaphone and explain this is a private yard, and this is how we’re supposed to behave,” said Durogene.

Occasionally, the stress everyone is living under boils over and both Durogene and Destine have found themselves on the receiving end of a barrage of vitriol.

“Sometimes I find people cursing me,” said Durogene who speaks—always—with a quiet, calm voice, a voice that most in the camp seem to respect,” but I stay strong.….I didn’t know it was so hard, so difficult. But I’ll stay until everything is stable.”

Commitment is at his core.

Ulrich Bien-Aime, the retired school teacher who was living in his sister’s house in the compound, told me that Durogene was close—for the second time—to achieving his dream of becoming an engineer when the quake hit. A bullet shattered his university hopes the first time.

“One afternoon he was standing on a corner with friends when Aristide was going down,” said Bien-Aime. “Soldiers were shooting.” A bullet grazed Durogene’s head, destroying the vision in his right eye, and setting him back in his studies.
But he didn’t give up, said Ulrich.

Durogene is 27 now. He had just one project left to complete before the degree was his. Then, his world crashed.

“There is no building. No university. No staff,” said Ulrich.

Durogene said he’s not sure what will come next with his schooling or even with job prospects—which are nothing if not extremely challenging in Haiti. But of this he is certain: His commitment to the camp and the people it’s sheltering is paramount.

“I cannot go out and look for a job now,” he said. “I want to be sure the structures are in place in here.”

The camp is just a beginning. As Haiti starts the long, arduous process of rebuilding itself, the social solidarity born from this tragedy, and all the potential of people forever shaped by it, can become the rocks from which mountains of good may rise.

Members of the Delmas 62 camp leadership committee. Stephan Durogene is on the left and Jennifer Banessa Destine is second from the right.

An estimated 230,000 lives lost; huge swaths of the capital destroyed; more than one million people homeless. Where in the sea of turmoil left by the January earthquake does Haiti begin to right itself? What are the first steps?

Whenever I asked those questions during my recent field visit there, the answer was often a long sigh. So much in Haiti—its infrastructure, its educational system, its job markets–demanded attention before this disaster. Now the need is hyper acute. Where in the world do you start?

One answer seems clear to me: Reconstruction starts with the Haitian people—like the committee of young leaders who emerged at Delmas 62 to help the hundreds of people camped in the yard of a private compound. They needed food and water, shelter and medical care. And they needed to be organized. It was through the efforts of twenty-somethings like Stephan Durogene, Jennifer Banessa Destine, and a handful of others that sorely needed assistance began to flow over the tumbled walls into the makeshift camp.

“Stephan, since the first time I met him, has always shown good potential,” says Ulrich Bien-Aime, a retired school teacher who was living in his sister’s house in the compound when the quake hit and has known Durogene since he was a high school student. “He believes in doing well, doing good, doing what’s right.”

In the month since the quake leveled much of Port-au-Prince, the opinion of Haitian civil society has gone largely unheard. But at the end of February, a coalition of civil groups is planning to hold a conference on reconstruction. Wouldn’t it be a perfect opportunity for new leaders, rising to the myriad challenges in the camps, to have their voices heard? Encouraging their participation in the decision-making that lies ahead can only make for a stronger Haiti.

Already, some of these leaders have shown enormous personal strength. When the buildings at Ruben Leconte University crashed around him, Durogene, an engineering major, helped pull students from the wreckage before heading off to find his parents and siblings. They were safe—and deeply relieved to see him. They had heard the university had collapsed, and feared that he had died in the rubble. But when they urged him to move with them to a safer part of the city, Durogene refused. He saw the need at Delmas 62 and decided that’s where he had to stay.

“I didn’t know I had this in me,” he said, sitting still for a rare moment in a patch of hot shade at the camp. It was about 10 days after the disaster struck. “It’s during the earthquake I realized I can be a good leader.”

Read part two.

Twelve-year-old Samuel swings a pick to build a drainage channel for his family. Photo: Kenny Rae / Oxfam America

It’s my first week back in Port-au-Prince after a respite in Boston. Last night was uncomfortable; not physically, as the tent is now packed away and I’m sharing a room in a down-at-heel hotel on a hill distantly overlooking the harbor. But listening to the rain, I knew that my conditions were luxurious compared to tens of thousands of families below in the city.

My concerns were confirmed first thing in the morning: in a small spontaneous camp in Delmas, 300 or so people had been through a miserable night. The rain had turned the dirt covering the small field into a thick layer of mud, and grassy strips at the side of the field were laid out with clothes, mattresses, even sodden cardboard boxes that had previously made up shelters.

Our intention in coming here was to set up latrines, but now other priorities seemed more pressing. Will the 400,000 square feet of plastic sheeting ordered arrive as promised next week? Distribution of this is critical to meet the shelter needs of more than a thousand families we’ve identified. Should I deploy two of the four Haitian engineers working with me to focus exclusively on drainage in camps? How would this affect the plan to set up water tanks next week, and the endless demand for toilets from neighborhoods throughout our working area? 

While dwelling on this, I find that people in the camps realize the need for drainage, and many of them are digging small trenches around their dwellings. Samuel, a 12-year-old-boy, is swinging a pick almost as big as himself, cutting a channel around the tiny tent that he shares with his mother and sister.

Other immediate issues emerge. I am told that the owner of a piece of land, now the site of a small camp at Delmas 83, has changed his mind. He wants latrines build on his property removed—even though hundreds are already using them.  

I ask “Does he realize that this is a much more hygienic solution than having people pooping in the open? And that it’s temporary, and Oxfam will fill and cover the pits?” 

“Yes, but he wants to talk with you,” comes the reply—so I know that a good part of tomorrow morning will involve resolving this, stretching my two years of high school French.

The problem at Delmas 77 was a bit more basic: the engineer had explained to the work crew that the latrine pit had to be dug 90 centimeters wide (about 3 feet); the next day he was running around gathering materials, and when he revisited today found a hardworking crew digging a pit 1.5 meters wide (fully 1 foot wider than the length of our latrine slabs). We had a talk about communication and the need for supervision, and came up with a solution.

I have a tentative plan for the next two weeks: to identify priority sites for additional water tanks, and start to set these up, to have one of the engineers trained in how to properly chlorinate and test water, to continue assessments to identify priority sites for more toilets and have these built.

But after seeing the impact of this week’s rain, and reviewing the increasing populations of the camps, and knowing that within a very short time the heavy rains will be here, I realize that we need much more plastic sheeting. After conferring with colleagues I call the manufacturer in Ohio and ask how soon we can have an additional 500,000 square feet. He’s sympathetic about our need, explains about his obligation to existing customers, but promises delivery here in two weeks. Hopefully this should give us enough time to distribute before the downpours arrive.

Residents help Oxfam dig latrines in a camp where tens of thousands of homeless people are now living.

Late last week, rain doused the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, heightening the dread of hundreds of thousands of people there who have been living in makeshift shelters since a massive earthquake destroyed great swaths of their city in January.

The rains start in earnest in April. And hurricane season arrives June 1. Cardboard and bed sheets—the materials that now serve as roofs and walls for countless people—are no match for Mother Nature. Even a plastic tarp will offer little comfort when the waters rush and rise. And they will.

This is Haiti where unchecked harvesting of wood—for construction, for charcoal–has left 98 percent of the country deforested, adding to the potential for flooding when heavy rain falls. And with many of the drainage channels around the capital now clogged with debris, where will the water go?

I’m remembering the anxious faces of the Haitians I met recently camped at Centre Sportif de Carrefour, a sports complex where several thousand homeless people had taken refuge under a variety of shelters, many of them constructed from sheets of white plastic stamped with “made in China” logos.

When it rains hard here, said Libermann Lexident, one of the camp leaders, the water pools up to three feet deep. That’s hip high on an adult. Everything below three feet gets soaked. Even so, he said, people would rather cope with the flooding than move back to their damaged homes, so profound is the fear the quake has left in its wake.

“If it’s raining, it’s going to be very hard,” said Lexident. “So far, we’ve been praying. It’s been answered. If it rains, we don’t know where to go.”

Last week’s downpour, drumming a warning on the plastic tarps strung across the capital, has heightened the urgency for tens of thousands of homeless families. Oxfam is distributing tents and plastic sheeting to thousands of them, and estimates indicate that there is enough shelter material in the capital, or en route, to meet the needs of about 50 percent of those who have been displaced. And aid groups think that as many as 40 percent of them could return to their homes if their buildings are declared safe. Oxfam has a team of structural engineers in the capital right now assessing that issue.

But as the rain approaches, the concern isn’t just for weather worthy shelter. Sanitation services have become a critical issue as well–especially latrines.

The numbers are frightening.

Aid groups estimate that the devastated region needs 18,000 toilets, but as the first-month anniversary of the quake approached, those groups and local workers had been able to dig fewer than 1,000 latrines. Oxfam had installed more than 20 percent of them—testament to its commitment in this area of expertise.

But the need remains enormous, especially as the rains approach and threaten to slop human waste into temporary settlements and crowded camps where there is little room to improve the drainage.

“We now need a surge in effort to improve sanitation facilities for people in Haiti,” said Marcel Stoessel, head of Oxfam in the country. “Let us not kid ourselves that this is going to be easy. It requires a Herculean humanitarian effort from all quarters. Around 230,000 people lost their lives on Jan. 12. It is our priority to make sure that we don’t let that number grow.”

Ever stop to consider where the money you spend gassing up your car actually goes? It is surprisingly hard to find out. We’ve just released a short animation “Follow the money” to raise awareness about how important it is for people to know where the money generated by resources like oil or gas goes and the need to use resource revenues to help poor communities.

Check it out and share it with your friends. And if you want to make sure that companies and governments have to disclose where all the money goes, join our effort to pass the Energy Security Through Transparency Act of 2009 (S. 1700).

A few years ago I actually attempted to “follow the money.”  I walked into the town hall of  Sadiola, Mali—a community near the border of Senegal—and asked the mayor how much money Sadiola got from the gold mine in town, which produced about half a million ounces of gold that year. The government of Mali owns part of the mine, and Balla Sissoko—the mayor—said that the government gave the town about US$500,000 each year, but he did not know what portion of those funds were generated by payments made by the mining company to the central government.

To me, Sadiola appeared in dire need of cash. The area was seeing rapid growth in population: In 1987, 250 people lived there—by 2005, the mayor reported that there were more than 10,000. Along with more people came more crime, increased demands for education, and health care for everyone, especially those injured in the increasingly frequent accidents on the dangerous, unpaved main road. Just these accidents were becoming a serious financial drain on Sadiola. “With all the resources from mining, why can’t they fix this road?” Sissoko asked. “Where is all the money going?”

Sissoko said the area has seen increases in incidence of HIV, and they were concerned about the environment. Both the massive open-pit mine, which generates a lot of dust and respiratory problems, and the increased demand from Sadiola’s residents for firewood resulting in deforestation, were long-term concerns.

Luckily for Sadiola, the mining company SEMOS, led by the South African company AngloGold Ashanti (which cleared nearly $3 billion in gold from all its mines in 2006), helped out. There used to be three schools in town, and by 2006 there were 23. Sadiola also invested in its own infrastructure: “In 1999 we had one small health center. But since the increase in mining revenue we have built four new health centers,” Sissoko said. And although the mine could never meet the demand for jobs in the area, it did employ about 500 people who might otherwise not have any way to earn cash.

So here’s the question: is the mine worth it? It’s hard for someone like Mayor Sissoko to tell. He can’t do a hard-eyed cost-benefit analysis without the figures. Mali’s laws on mining revenues and an opaque budget system make it impossible. People in communities producing oil, gas, and minerals have a right to know where the money is going, and how it is being used for their benefit, so they can make their own decisions about their future.

The photos that emerged from Haiti in recent days—nearly a month since the earthquake—show what life has become for individuals and families now living in temporary homes, representing a tiny fraction of the nearly one million people left homeless.

In the moments and days following the earthquake, each one of the survivors set forth to perform the tasks and experience moments of everyday life that we all share—caring for children, laundry washed and hung to dry, boys playing with toy cars. Captured so beautifully in this small collection of photos, these images reveal the intimate details of each of these lives.

Photo: Liz Lucas / Oxfam America

Children can be so creative and resourceful. The ingenuity of this boy is astounding—creating a toy car from a carton, a handful of lids, and a piece of string. Just a few weeks back, my 8-year-old nephew was hard at work on a similarly constructed vehicle.

Photo: Oxfam

There is a tenderness in this portrait of a woman and children living in a camp for displaced people. The quality of light, the softness of color and warmth of their expressions invites me to make a direct connection.

Photo: Ivan Muñoz / Oxfam