Oxfam America Blog

In Thiraimadu camp, Sri Lanka,Yealini, holds her one-year-old baby, Rohith. They stand outside their post-tsunami transitional shelter. Photo by: Howard Davies/Oxfam.

I’ve been thinking a lot about heritage lately. My husband, John, and I are expecting our first child in about a week. John’s a New Englander, who traces his roots back to various European intersections, but not one that he identifies with in particular. I’m from California, the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants.

Everyone we know is fascinated by the sort of child the two of us would produce; the fact that we’ve decided not to find out the gender just makes it all the more intriguing. Will the baby have my South Asian features – big eyes, dark hair, caramel coloring – or will he or she have my mother-in-law’s trademark heart-shaped face, almond eyes, and long lashes. Could it be the “perfect baby” (someone actually said this to me once) and be a lovely cross of both?

And since it will be a biracial child, how will we make sure he or she has some connection to its roots? Read the rest of this entry »

Dabo Huka sits with her daughter, Tume. Photo by Sarah Livingston/Oxfam America

A news story earlier this month reported that women in the US may be about to reach a turning point, thanks to the recession. For the first time in history, more of them will be employed than men. But it’s not because women are suddenly flocking to the job market and landing fabulous opportunities. It’s that men are getting laid off in great numbers—while women hold onto the lower-paying jobs they’ve always had.

When I read that story I thought ah, how like the rest of the world the mighty US is becoming. Here, as in many developing countries I’ve visited with Oxfam, women are shouldering the burden of keeping their families together—both financially and domestically. More than a handful of women I know, myself included, have become the chief bread winners in our households. Read the rest of this entry »

Painted cool aqua blue or turquoise, the walls in some of the houses in coastal southern Sri Lanka are mostly bare. These are new houses—or ones that have been repaired—and belong to families who survived the 2004 tsunami. Uncluttered, the walls serve as simple frames for the photographs of mothers, fathers, and children propped on shelves or dangling from nails behind pieces of dusty glass. Read the rest of this entry »

In the peace of early evening, as the heat ebbed and the dogs curled into the shallow beds they had scratched in the dust, E.T. Sarath sat folded in his sarong on the veranda of the temple near his home on the southern tip of Sri Lanka. A monk at the temple had offered us tea, steaming and electrifyingly sweet in porcelain cups, and we were sipping it quietly, thinking about all that Sarath had told us and worrying that his tsunami tale—blunt and bitter—could be so different from W.H. Priyanka Krishanthi’s.

“Now people have come to a situation that’s worse than the tsunami—and that’s dependency,” Sarath had said. “Most of the NGOs are responsible for this situation.” Read the rest of this entry »

Coir Spinning Wheel

What’s that sound? The crank of a wheel, powered by a young boy, spinning out yard upon yard of filament made of coir—the fiber from coconut husks that forms the basis of a major cottage industry in Sri Lanka. He was hard at work, along with two older women, in the late afternoon recently in the village of Bambaranda where many women help support their families by turning coir into products like rope, door mats, and sacks. Read the rest of this entry »

Before she left on a field visit to India and Sri Lanka, a colleague dropped off a present at my desk: three red-skinned potatoes in a plastic sack—the remains of the stash she keeps handy for lunch. She didn’t want them to rot while she was away, and being a spud fan I was glad to get them, especially now that I’ve learned that 2008 is the International Year of the Potato—so named by the United Nations at the behest of Peru.

In a year that’s experiencing a frightening global food crisis, choosing to promote this stalwart tuber—people in the Peruvian highlands have been eating them for more than 8,000 years—seems more than serendipitous. It’s imperative. There are lots of reasons why. Read the rest of this entry »