Oxfam America Blog

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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HIV/AIDS caregiver Lebogang Molefi, right, with patient Maria Mogale, in South Africa’s North West Province. Molefi works for Pholo Modi Wa Sechaba, one of thousands of community organizations helping the country’s roughly 5.5 million people living with HIV/AIDS. Photo: Brett Eloff / Oxfam America

Last month I won a free subscription to the glitzy celebrity magazine US Weekly. At first I was skeptical, but I’ll admit it’s become a guilty pleasure: After working on poverty issues all week at Oxfam, I kind of enjoy reading about fashion faux pas and learning how celebrities are “just like us!”

I never thought the two worlds would collide, but they did last week, when the magazine covered pop singer Madonna’s battle to adopt Mercy James, a 3-year-old girl from Malawi. It was bizarre to flip through those shiny pages, filled with expensive clothes and glamorous photos, and then read about a country with a reported 1.5 million children orphaned by HIV/AIDS.

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Sahera begins her morning duties as a rag-picker in Lucknow, India, where Oxfam funds a school and health programs for working children. According to Peter Singer, kids—in India and elsewhere—are one of the groups most at risk from poverty-related diseases. Photo: Tom Pietrasik / Oxfam

When I visited my hometown of Bombay, India, last month, I found myself trapped in complex moral dilemmas, even as I went through the motions of everyday life. There, the urban poor live smashed up against a growing affluent class. Despair, hunger, and homelessness rest uneasily side-by-side with designer boutiques and Western-inspired malls.

I remember tightly clutching my ice cream cone on a crowded commuter train, the sticky cream melting down my wrist in the midday heat. But how could I eat it when a little boy stared at me, wide-eyed, hungry, and begging for spare change?

Back home in Boston, I attended a reading last week by the author Peter Singer. Singer, the renowned and prolific Princeton bioethicist, has championed animal rights and written passionately about the ethics of giving. His new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, posits the moral argument that each one of us has the power to make a difference in the fight against poverty.

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A woman walking in the Kup District of Chimbu Province, Papua New Guinea, where people are vulnerable to more frequent and intense cyclones caused by climate change. Photo: Jerry Galea / Oxfam

Yesterday, some friends of mine had a daughter, who they named Abigail Rose. In the photos I saw this morning, she looks impossibly miniature, almost too tiny to be real; yet up close, she also sports a lot of thick brown hair and an oddly thoughtful expression.

I don’t have kids, so I’m sort of an outsider on the whole process, and I find it just a little bit mind-boggling. Looking at the photos, I can’t help but wonder: What will life be like for someone born in 2009? How will Abigail’s world be different from ours?

Sometimes I worry about that world. Take a new study released yesterday, which found that the effects of climate change are now irreversible–or, in the words of Science Daily, “To a large extent, there’s no going back.”

Led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the study found that even if all polluters stopped emitting carbon tomorrow, the effects of human-induced global warming could last for the next 1,000 years or more. That’s way beyond Abigail’s lifetime, her children’s, and even her great-great-grandchildren’s.

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School in Lumphat village, Ratanakiri province, Cambodia; January 2007 - Photo by Brett Eloff/Oxfam America.

“The face of climate change is a child under the age of 5.” When Dr. Kristie L. Ebi said this at a brown bag lunch discussion in my office earlier this week, you could hear her words land like a ton of bricks.

Children, especially those living in tropic and sub tropic regions like Sub Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, are most vulnerable to the increasing consequences of global warming. Read the rest of this entry »

Traveling with her new baby under her burka, this 25-year-old woman is escorted by her father along the rough roads of Badakshan on her way to a health post two hours away to seek help for the bleeding she has been experiencing. There, she learned she has liver damage and may have problems with future deliveries. Photo by Alix Fazzina

Badakhshan, a remote and mountainous province in Afghanistan, has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the world: For every 100,000 live births, 6,500 mothers die. About the time that statistic came across my desk, the New York Times ran a picture on its front page—and several more inside—showing the bone-dry hills and rudimentary living conditions in one of Afghanistan’s poorest provinces: Bamian. The Times story was about the hunger looming over one-quarter of the country’s population, and Oxfam’s warning about a potential humanitarian crisis. Drought, an unusually harsh winter, and a lack of security have all contributed to the food shortage.

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