A picture of President-elect Barack Obama found its way onto the wall of an emergency shelter in El Salvador. Photo By Luis Galdamez
I was in El Salvador recently, and the talk was all about elections—ours and theirs. They were preparing for across-the-board voting, from the president down through legislative and municipal offices, the kind of potential housecleaning that comes along only once every 15 years. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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 »
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