Oxfam America Blog

A herder in Ethiopia watches over his cattle in a parched pasture.

Caterpillars are crunching through the crops in Liberia. Twenty million migrant workers in China can’t find jobs. And in the US, the unemployment rate continued its upward climb to 7.6 percent last month when 598,000 more people found themselves out of work.

That’s the news that jumped out at me this morning and that I can’t help lumping together into a scary heap of headlines.

What have caterpillars got to do with migrant workers in China and factory hands in the United States?  Read the rest of this entry »

Jamil Hamzah walks through rice fields in Gampang Ladang, Indonesia, where Oxfam helped farmers purchase rice paddy seed. According to a new UN report, Indonesia is one of just seven countries where 65 percent of the world’s hungry people live. Photo: Jim Holmes/Oxfam

Each day, the epidemic is spreading further across the globe, extending its tendrils into every nation on earth. It strikes women and children first, as well as the poorest among us. Nearly 1 billion people are already affected, and this year alone, an additional 40 million more suffered its symptoms: fatigue, dizziness, extreme weakness, even death.

The thing is, you don’t read much about this epidemic in the headlines these days. No one’s handing out ribbons or marching for a cure. Though it’s treatable, people aren’t doing much to prevent it. In fact, hardly anyone seems to be paying attention.

Read the rest of this entry »

What a week to launch a blog about humanitarian work.

It’s been a week that has seen the death toll from the May 3 cyclone in Myanmar inch upward as Oxfam worries about the outbreak of disease among survivors and the United Nations warns that 2.5 million people are now in urgent need of aid. Read the rest of this entry »