March 20th, 2009 | by Zeenat Potia
Sahera begins her morning duties as a rag-picker in Lucknow, India, where Oxfam funds a school and health programs for working children. According to Peter Singer, kids—in India and elsewhere—are one of the groups most at risk from poverty-related diseases. Photo: Tom Pietrasik / Oxfam
When I visited my hometown of Bombay, India, last month, I found myself trapped in complex moral dilemmas, even as I went through the motions of everyday life. There, the urban poor live smashed up against a growing affluent class. Despair, hunger, and homelessness rest uneasily side-by-side with designer boutiques and Western-inspired malls.
I remember tightly clutching my ice cream cone on a crowded commuter train, the sticky cream melting down my wrist in the midday heat. But how could I eat it when a little boy stared at me, wide-eyed, hungry, and begging for spare change?
Back home in Boston, I attended a reading last week by the author Peter Singer. Singer, the renowned and prolific Princeton bioethicist, has championed animal rights and written passionately about the ethics of giving. His new book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, posits the moral argument that each one of us has the power to make a difference in the fight against poverty.
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March 12th, 2009 | by Coco McCabe
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 »
November 24th, 2008 | by Coco McCabe
There’s a new book out there that makes sobering reading—and it may help bring a little perspective to the unease financially comfortable Americans are feeling as they watch the value of their homes plummet and their savings evaporate.
Called “The Measure of America,” it’s a clear-eyed, methodical examination of one of our treasured myths: That with pluck and persistence the American dream—a decent standard of living, a long and healthy life, a good education—can belong to all of us.
It just ain’t so.
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October 29th, 2008 | by Anna Kramer
Muthoni Muriu, director of Oxfam America’s overseas programs, talks about why the US presidential election matters to people around the world—especially those living in poverty:
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July 22nd, 2008 | by Coco McCabe
For one of the richest countries in the world, we have a dark underbelly. It’s laid bare in a new report that measures the well-being of people rather than the size of our gross domestic product or the vitality of our stock market.
The truth that emerges from these 246 pages is that poverty—gauged by educational attainment, income, and longevity—stretches across this land of plenty. It’s not just a problem for developing countries; it’s a problem right here. Read the rest of this entry »
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