Oxfam America Blog

“I am here today because I do care about the environment. Climate change is affecting human life and so many farmers around the world,” said Sophie, one of the students who took part in the action.

I especially like this image because it reminds me of attention-getting events organized by our Oxfam America volunteers here in the US, like last year’s Walk for climate justice. It’s inspiring to think that like-minded people on the other side of the world share the same dedication.

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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Equipped with cameras and a quick lesson on how to use them, 20 Afghan women and their children fanned out to record their lives last year in a project sponsored by Oxfam and its partner, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief. The images they captured—and the words they used to describe them—are filling my mind now as I read about a high-level  meeting on the future of Afghanistan that’s set to take place tomorrow in The Hague. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by Ceerwan Aziz

This is Jameela.

She’s featured in a new report Oxfam has just published on the challenges facing women in Iraq today—challenges that have plunged many of them, including those widowed by the war, deep into poverty. “In Her Own Words” is the name of the report.  But words hardly begin to capture all that Jameela’s face conveys.

I print out her portrait and study it.

She’s 50. Only 50.

Two years younger than me? How could that be? Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Jessica Erickson / Oxfam America

My colleague Jessica recently traveled to the Cajamarca region of Peru, where she visited communities that face threats to their land and water supply from the Yanacocha gold mine. Along the way she captured some great photos of the local people and the changed landscape.

While working with Jess to create an audio slideshow about her trip, I’ve found myself vividly remembering my own visit to the Peruvian Andes in 2006: the clean, cold, impossibly thin air; the wild green hillsides and silent stone ruins; the tall white clouds racing over the peaks.  Once you’ve seen these ancient landscapes, you never really forget them.

This power comes through in Jess’ portrait of Doña Maria Castrajón Flores (above). An indigenous Quechua speaker, Flores lives in near solitude on her family’s ancestral farmland, raising a few cattle and growing potatoes at over 12,000 feet above sea level.

As Flores looks out over her land, she also contemplates the presence of the mining company, which leaves its mark in the buildings and roads zigzagging along the distant hillside.

“I don’t want to sell my land to the mine, because I have nowhere to go,” Flores told her visitors. “My children were born and raised here on the mountain. I don’t want to move anywhere else.”

As 2008 winds down, we’re highlighting photos we think best capture Oxfam’s work this year. Here is one of my favorites–with an explanation why. More to come from others.

Loko Dadacha, photographed by Sarah Livingston

In this supposed season of joy, trouble fills our world: a cholera outbreak and widespread hunger in Zimbabwe, a food crisis in Afghanistan that’s threatening five million people, bursts of violence in the eastern provinces of Democratic Republic of Congo that have forced a quarter of a million people from their homes, a conflict in Darfur that has dragged on for nearly six years and wrecked the lives of millions of Sudanese—the list goes on. And that’s the killer. Where is the hope in this bottomless pit of suffering?

I think I know. Read the rest of this entry »

As 2008 draws to a close, we’re highlighting some of the photos that we thought best captured Oxfam’s work this year. Here are my own personal picks; more to come from others.

Photo: Steve Thackston / Oxfam America

This portrait of Biloxi, MS resident Mary Meltz appeared in Mirror on America, Oxfam’s report on the state of US Gulf Coast recovery three years after Hurricane Katrina. Meltz stands in front of her new home, where construction is nearly complete, thanks to the efforts of her son Michael (an artist who covered the walls with elaborate murals), community groups, and teams of volunteers. Visible over her shoulder is the FEMA trailer where Meltz lived for nearly three years.

To me, this divided image–and Meltz’s look of weary, patient hope–captures the in-between state of many of the people I met when I visited Biloxi in June. Three years after the storm, they are still struggling to rebuild their lives, even as they look to better times ahead.

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