Oxfam America Blog

Tom Mahin, in blue shirt, helps set up a tapstand with five drinking faucets, which draws clean water from an Oxfam water bladder. Photo: Kenny Rae / Oxfam America

Oxfam humanitarian response specialist Kenny Rae is currently in Haiti working on the recovery effort. Here’s his latest blog from Port-au-Prince.

Six months ago, Tom Mahin’s focus was figuring out how to improve the quality of drinking water in the Massachusetts city of Gloucester, whose 30,000 residents had been told to boil their tap water before drinking it due to high levels of harmful bacteria.

Today his task, albeit on a smaller scale, is arguably more important: For the first time since the January 12 earthquake, 340 displaced families in Impasse Fouget, Port-au-Prince, have safe drinking water, thanks to Mahin and Haitian engineer Donald St. Preux. Mahin is a drinking water specialist with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and is working as an advisor to Oxfam America in Haiti.

Because of the urgent need, we chose this spontaneous camp to be the first to receive one of the 10 bladders—they look like big rubber pillows that hold about 2,900 gallons of water—that just arrived. Until now the 1,482 people in this densely populated location close to the city center were venturing out as far as a kilometer for drinking water.

Oxfam’s job is not only to provide water, but to ensure its quality, all with the participation of the people who will be drinking it.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Rev. Jean-Jacques Frederic helped organize a camp for displaced people.

Raymond C. Offenheiser, Oxfam America’s president, recounts his impressions of the ravaged Haitian capital after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the city leaving 230,000 people dead and more than one million others homeless.

I arrived in Port-au-Prince on the one-month anniversary of the ghastly earthquake that rocked Haiti to its core.  The airport was hectic, full of UN officials, aid workers and military personnel frantically working to move goods and people, struggling to coordinate and manage their own stress in face of the monumental task that confronted them. 

As we left the airport, the scale of the tragedy unfolded: block after block of collapsed buildings and 500,000 people living in ramshackle shelters. Some had tents. Some had the familiar blue sheeting, and others had nothing more than bed sheets.  Disposable cups, plastic bags and every other kind of trash formed piles on the perimeter as overtaxed sanitation workers tried to manage the exploding scale of this human refuse. 

Much of this story has been told, but I was privileged to witness a new beginning.  An effort by an entire nation to confront and accept an unspeakable level of grief.  Read the rest of this entry »

After the quake in Chile. Photo by Victor Ruiz Caballero/Reuters, courtesy of Alertnet.

There’s a tendency to compare disasters, and I am sure many of us started to do that Saturday morning when we heard about the 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile. Another earthquake! Is it like the one in Haiti?

The answer is of course no, Chile is a completely different place. Although the earthquake was a significantly stronger (something like 500 times stronger than the 12 January Haiti quake, if that is even possible), it hit a much less densely populated area with a government equipped with resources to respond.

I immediately remembered an article on the BBC web site I read two days after the now infamous Port-au-Prince quake last month. It attempted something incredibly difficult: comparing the relative size, death toll, economic impact, proximity to urban areas and the poverty and population density in affected areas of three earthquakes in China (2008), Italy (2009) and Haiti (2010). Read the rest of this entry »

Members of the Delmas 62 camp leadership committee. Stephan Durogene is on the left and Jennifer Banessa Destine is second from the right.

An estimated 230,000 lives lost; huge swaths of the capital destroyed; more than one million people homeless. Where in the sea of turmoil left by the January earthquake does Haiti begin to right itself? What are the first steps?

Whenever I asked those questions during my recent field visit there, the answer was often a long sigh. So much in Haiti—its infrastructure, its educational system, its job markets–demanded attention before this disaster. Now the need is hyper acute. Where in the world do you start?

One answer seems clear to me: Reconstruction starts with the Haitian people—like the committee of young leaders who emerged at Delmas 62 to help the hundreds of people camped in the yard of a private compound. They needed food and water, shelter and medical care. And they needed to be organized. It was through the efforts of twenty-somethings like Stephan Durogene, Jennifer Banessa Destine, and a handful of others that sorely needed assistance began to flow over the tumbled walls into the makeshift camp. Read the rest of this entry »

Twelve-year-old Samuel swings a pick to build a drainage channel for his family. Photo: Kenny Rae / Oxfam America

It’s my first week back in Port-au-Prince after a respite in Boston. Last night was uncomfortable; not physically, as the tent is now packed away and I’m sharing a room in a down-at-heel hotel on a hill distantly overlooking the harbor. But listening to the rain, I knew that my conditions were luxurious compared to tens of thousands of families below in the city.

My concerns were confirmed first thing in the morning: in a small spontaneous camp in Delmas, 300 or so people had been through a miserable night. The rain had turned the dirt covering the small field into a thick layer of mud, and grassy strips at the side of the field were laid out with clothes, mattresses, even sodden cardboard boxes that had previously made up shelters.

Our intention in coming here was to set up latrines, but now other priorities seemed more pressing. Will the 400,000 square feet of plastic sheeting ordered arrive as promised next week? Distribution of this is critical to meet the shelter needs of more than a thousand families we’ve identified. Should I deploy two of the four Haitian engineers working with me to focus exclusively on drainage in camps? How would this affect the plan to set up water tanks next week, and the endless demand for toilets from neighborhoods throughout our working area? 

Read the rest of this entry »

The photos that emerged from Haiti in recent days—nearly a month since the earthquake—show what life has become for individuals and families now living in temporary homes, representing a tiny fraction of the nearly one million people left homeless.

In the moments and days following the earthquake, each one of the survivors set forth to perform the tasks and experience moments of everyday life that we all share—caring for children, laundry washed and hung to dry, boys playing with toy cars. Captured so beautifully in this small collection of photos, these images reveal the intimate details of each of these lives.

Photo: Liz Lucas / Oxfam America

Katty Rebecca Matin, 13, spends several hours each day studying the school books she brought with her in a pillowcase.

For kids not affected by the devastating earthquake that rocked Haiti in January, schools re-opened the first of this month. But few students in the North-West and South departments have shown up—not a promising sign for the government’s intention to open the rest of the country’s schools by March 1. Around Port-au-Prince, the temblor reduced many of them to rubble, making it hard for kids to shake the nightmarish possibility of what that could have meant for them had the quake hit earlier in the afternoon when they were seated at their desks.

It struck just before 5 p.m. Kids had left for the day. Thankfully.

I heard that whisper of relief voiced over and over again on the dusty streets of the capital as we drove past schools with pancaked floors and collapsed walls. Countless lives saved by chance. Thankfully.

But what’s been interrupted now is the certainty, order, and measure of opportunity that the school day brought to the lives of Haitian kids who had managed to secure themselves a place in a classroom—even if that classroom lacked both amenities and rigor. Read the rest of this entry »