Oxfam America Blog

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 »

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 »