Oxfam America Blog

The system of rice intensification, or SRI, is an agircultural technique that improves the yields of farmers while using fewer seeds and less water. The method is improving the lives of more than 80,000 farmers in Cambodia. Photo by Isabelle Lesser/Oxfam America

“One sixth of humanity undernourished”

That was the stark headline on a news story put out at the end of last week by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. All it takes is some simple math, and suddenly the immensity of the global hunger problem is as clear as a line in the sand: five of us stand on this side, one of us on the other. Read the rest of this entry »

Clara Herrero, a program assistant at Oxfam America, recently visited an Oxfam project in Cambodia. She traveled as part of Oxfam’s travel lottery, which sends two employees – who don’t get to travel outside the US as part of their jobs – to see our work on-the-ground in developing countries.

I recently went to Cambodia, accompanying my colleagues from Oxfam’s Humanitarian Response team as they learned more about a project teaching local communities how to adapt to climate change. It was my first time visiting one of our regional offices and my first “in the field.”

Early in my trip, I went to the Tuol Sleng Museum. During the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, the museum was a prison where millions of Cambodians (and many thousands of foreigners) were starved to death, tortured, and killed. It’s now a monument to that history and a place, which lists all the crimes of the regime.  One stood out in my mind. In Cambodia, families place great importance on eating meals together. During Pol Pot’s reign, they weren’t able to share meals with their family.

I thought a lot about this tradition as I traveled with my Oxfam colleagues, Latif, Kheng, Jacobo, and Miriam. Over the three weeks I spent in Cambodia, we began to feel like a family.

Oxfam Staff Clara Herrero, Miriam Aschkenasy, and Jacobo Ocharan take in the sights at the ancient temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

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If you’ve had a child or two, as I have, it’s difficult to look at maternal mortality rates and not consider them personally. Giving birth can be hard and scary work, even with the help of the best attendants and most high-tech medical facilities the developed world can offer. That’s why a graph like the one below is so unsettling—for all that it says about the conditions other mothers must endure, and for the stark fact that so many don’t survive.

To understand the graph a little better, and why it’s a useful tool for the kind of work we do, listen to Miriam Aschkenasy’s explanation:

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She’s Oxfam America’s public health specialist and an emergency room physician. This graph was put together for our humanitarian response department, which wanted to gauge the rates in some of the countries in which we work and compare them with western countries.

This graph shows the rates of maternal mortality per 100,000 live births in nine countries.
*The numbers have been adjusted to correct for misclassification and underreporting.

A woman drives a motor bike through the busy streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Photo: Brett Eloff for Oxfam America.

Last June, I spent my final night in Cambodia taking in the sunset over the Mekong River. We had just returned from a grueling trip to interview traditional gold miners in Mondulkiri province; I was covered in dust, sore from the motorbike ride, and generally ready to sleep on a hotel mattress.

But, I’d had so much fun on the trip, whipping through the forests, slipping up through dry creek beds, I was feeling a surprising bit of apprehension about going home. So, in an effort to eke out one last memorable evening, I agreed to stop in Phnom Penh at what the locals called Snowy’s bar. This is where all my expat friends said they went to chill out and escape the constant hustle and bustle of city life. After the trip I’d just been on, and three weeks in general running around the region, I understood the allure. Perched on a stool on the open-air deck, I watched the boats float by and the sky turn a soft shade of orange.

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Katie Taft is the regional communications officer for Oxfam America in its East Asia office in Phnom Penh. Here is her account about one way to predict the size of a harvest.

Groundhog Day is the one holiday when Americans put their faith into a small furry creature to tell them if winter will last six more weeks, or if they will finally see the sunshine melt the snow away. But we all know that it is only a bit of superstitious fun.

I am thinking of this holiday as I push my way through throngs of schoolchildren waving small Cambodian flags and holding plastic flowers to cheer on the sacred cows that are making their way a second time around the Royal Palace lawn. Read the rest of this entry »

Karey Kenst is a program associate working with Oxfam America’s disaster risk reduction initiative. She recently returned from a trip to Cambodia. Here are some of her impressions.

As our car barreled down the road from Phnom Penh toward our northern destination of Battambang province, I couldn’t resist snapping photos of the Cambodian landscape and everyday scenes passing by. Palm trees standing tall against the wide sky, vendors selling liters of gasoline from roadside stalls, heat waves rising from the road behind us. Along the way we passed crews cautiously searching for unexploded land mines, a present-day danger left behind from decades of war. Read the rest of this entry »