Oxfam America Blog

In Fenadesal Sur, El Salvador, disaster preparedness is incorporated into a game of hopscotch. Photo by Claudia Barrientos

“Flooding…houses collapsed…community committee activated….evacuation…meeting point…shelter!”

On the hot pavement in the center of Fenadesal Sur, children lined up for a game of hopscotch, only this one had a twist: each time they paused to jump forward, they called out the next step in a journey from disaster to safety.

If their legs wobbled a little on the one-footed hops, their voices didn’t: the children knew the sequence by heart. In fact, some of them had lived it. When the rains of November 2009 swelled the river Acelhuate, more than 100 houses in this community were damaged, and 30 were destroyed. Many of these children lost their homes and are now living in a nearby shelter. Read the rest of this entry »

Mud and debris fill the streets of communities in El Salvador following days of heavy rain that triggered landslides and floods. Photo by CORDES

More than 100 people are dead in El Salvador following days of torrential rain that triggered floods and landslides. Over the weekend, the first emails hit from colleagues. Then wire service stories started showing up in newspapers around the country. This morning, I have spent the past hour emailing with my colleague Tjarda in San Salvador: Thousands of people have flocked to shelters. Some have seen their houses washed away by the raging waters, and many will return home to widespread damage.

It’s hard to fathom the devastation that rain can cause, but in a poor country where many of its seven million citizens live in precarious locations—in low-lying areas prone to flooding, or along steep hillsides whose fronts slip away when water-logged—the destruction can be sweeping.

And one of the worst consequences of flooding is the pollution of drinking water. Read the rest of this entry »

A resident searches for victims under a collapsed hotel in Padang on Indonesia's Sumatra island. Photo by Reuters/Crack Palinggi, courtesy of www.alertnet.org

At a powwow here this morning, fund-raisers, press officers, and writers—not quite believing the cascade of bad news–huddled over the headlines sprawled across a table in one of the cubicles: “Quakes Ravage Sumatra and Samoas,” said one.

“Tsunami Came Too Fast for Warnings to Reach All,” said another.

“Typhoon Eases, Leaving More Than 300 Dead,” said a third.

And this one, which summed up the shock of it all best:  “Week of Tragedy for Asia.”

It’s a week that has left us here at Oxfam racing to help meet the needs of some of the countless people who have seen their homes crash down around them following the earthquake that hit Sumatra, their villages flattened by the tsunami that swept into Samoa and Tonga, and all that’s familiar washed away in the flooding unleashed by Typhoon Ketsana  as it roared across the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. 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 »