Oxfam America Blog

Oxfam America Boston staffers watching the inauguration. Photo: Ephraim Freed

Like many of you, I watched yesterday’s inauguration with a crowd: my Oxfam America co-workers, and a few of their kids and spouses, too. At noon, many of us clustered around the big TV in the lobby of our office, balancing our sandwiches on our laps as we watched history in the making.

Amidst all the rhetoric of the day, I was particularly struck by one quote from President Obama’s inauguration speech:

“To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds.

And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders, nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.”

What do you think: Are we really waking up this morning to a world transformed? And if things have indeed changed, what must we do, as individuals, to keep up the momentum?

Mogadishu, Somalia

The first line of a recent update sent by colleagues working on Somalia has been stuck in my head all weekend: The country has been without an effective central government since 1991. That’s almost 18 years—a lifetime for countless kids who have known nothing but the chaos and fear factional fighting inflicts on everybody.

What if that’s all you knew? What would that do to your understanding of the world? What would it do to your sense of hope?

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A picture of President-elect Barack Obama found its way onto the wall of an emergency shelter in El Salvador. Photo By Luis Galdamez

I was in El Salvador recently, and the talk was all about elections—ours and theirs. They were preparing for across-the-board voting, from the president down through legislative and municipal offices, the kind of potential housecleaning that comes along only once every 15 years. Read the rest of this entry »