Oxfam America Blog

The news from the Haiti earthquake is always staggering.

With the loss of life, the lack of medical care, the collapse of the center of government, the airport that can’t keep pace with the needs, the ruined roads, the non-existent communications system, and the desperate lack of fuel,  the pain and worry that survivors are experiencing is almost impossible to imagine.

Facts and figures tell a piece of the story, but I find Haiti’s reality sometimes hits home through the casual remarks of my colleagues.

Like when my buddy Coco McCabe writes me a message from Port-au-Prince. It starts out sounding kind of normal: “I’m sitting in a meeting, ” she writes, before veering off into a scene from a bad dream. “It was just suggested that we hold meetings outside in future because we are a lot of people and if there’s a big hit, we’ll suffer a lot of casualties.”  In my world, staff meetings and sudden death don’t exist side by side, but in hers today in Haiti, they clearly do.

“There seems to be plenty of food on the streets,” she continues. That is wonderful to hear, until she points out that there is no cash anywhere to buy it with. “Banks are mostly shut down, and people can’t get to their money.”

Louis Belanger of Oxfam Canada has been on the ground in Haiti for a week, and he has lots of good news in his daily podcast:

“We had a good day today …We delivered a lot of water. We were active in three main sites across Port-au-Prince. Two of them were in Petionville and one in Delmas. We delivered probably over 30,000 liters of water to over 3,000 people… Read the rest of this entry »

Years of conflict in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo have left people facing countless hardships. Photo by Liz Lucas/Oxfam America

A new report shows a frightening spike in attacks on aid workers. Last year, 260 were killed, kidnapped, or seriously injured. That’s almost a four-fold increase since 1998 when 69 were attacked. Among those killed, the figure has more than tripled since 1998 with 122 workers losing their lives in 2008.

Numbers always have a remoteness to them—until they describe a part of your life.

These numbers do. Read the rest of this entry »

“Disaster happens whenever you travel,” said Nazareth, our circumspect colleague. “It’s a matter of coping.”

He was talking about Miriam, Oxfam America’s public health specialist, sprawled in the front seat of the truck. She looked pale and a little sweaty. And she was praying for a pit stop. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a plug for good reading–and good rearing.

It’s about a book on Africa. A book that will help plant your feet on the ground there, even if you can’t visit, and make you keen on an upbringing awash in the ways of other cultures.

The book is Peter Godwin’s Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa. It’s a memoir about his childhood in Rhodesia–now Zimbabwe–and his friendships with black Africans as the country slipped into chaos. Read the rest of this entry »

I got a workout in the Democratic Republic of Congo during a field visit there in March. But not the kind I expected. I got it sitting–or lurching–in the back of four-wheel-drive vehicles as they negotiated what pass for roads in Congo.

They’re mostly terrible–and they’re the first thing you notice when you cross the border from well-paved Rwanda. You get slammed. The vehicle hits swells of volcanic rock pushing up through the mud, and it pitches down into black ruts as it creeps through Goma, the capital of North Kivu province. Read the rest of this entry »