Oxfam America Blog

Right now, my world is neat and orderly. From the office to the gym to my apartment, from my favorite restaurants to the streets of my neighborhood, most of my day-to-day life is enclosed by places I know well. Places where I feel comfortable.

But starting with a 14-hour-long flight later this week—and culminating in a 10-day journey along the uneven roads of southern Ethiopia—life is about to get uncomfortable in a big hurry.

I’m about to go beyond anything I’ve ever done before. And that’s both scary and exciting.

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So I’ve finally taken the plunge: I joined Twitter.

People join Twitter every day, of course, but for me the decision had a special significance. Back in April I blogged about the risks of Twitter and what those could mean for Oxfam; my post generated lots of responses, both online and in person.

Oxfam America has had our own Twitter feed for a while now, and it’s definitely helped us get the word out. (Ironically enough, a few readers mentioned that Twitter was actually where they found my blog post.) But I had, and still have, some real reservations about it. As a writer, I worry about the erosion of language and all its power and nuance. As a communicator for social justice, I fear the abbreviated form could also mean the end of in-depth storytelling as we know it. So in some ways, joining Twitter–even though I did so for personal, not Oxfam-related, reasons–felt like a surrender.

However, I admit that I might possibly, just maybe, could have overreacted.

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Did you know that “global warming” is too depressing to talk about these days? Yep, it’s true. Instead,  we can call it “our deteriorating atmosphere,” like it’s a beloved old relative who’s begun the unavoidable aging process. And “energy efficiency” just sounds scary. Instead, it’s all about “saving money for a more prosperous future.”

In the Carteret Islands, Papua New Guinea, a rise in sea level is cutting off people’s supplies of fresh water and fertile land. The islands’ residents will be among the first people to be forced to migrate due to climate change. Photo: Toby Parkinson / Oxfam

While we’re at it, there’s got to be a more upbeat way to talk about people in the world’s most vulnerable communities, who bear the brunt of the effects of climate change. Instead of poor, perhaps we could call them “those of lesser wealth.”  And the Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea, whose homes are disappearing due to rising sea levels? They’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time–or in other words, “locationally challenged.”

OK, so I made up the last couple of examples. But the first two come from a very real recent attempt to re-brand climate change to make it more palatable to the public.

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Oxfam : ) Poverty : (

That’s what I told my colleague Tim our new tagline will be before long. And while it’s not quite that bad yet, I wasn’t completely joking.

It all started with a conversation about Twitter, which, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is an important new communications tool. Over nine million people are actively tweeting these days; I’ve seen that little blue logo popping up everywhere of late, on website I visit, on blogs I read, and even on ads.

And NGOs aren’t exempt from the frenzy. Oxfam America has our own Twitter feed, which recently reached our goal of 1,000 followers. Almost overnight, this condensed, gibberish-ridden, 140-character limit medium–which I thought would be only a passing fad–has become one of the fastest-growing ways for people to hear about our work.

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Community radio operators in the studio in Mangalamapatti, India. Photo: Atul Loke / Panos for Oxfam America

Few verbal chasms loom as large as the one between “us” and “them.” Between these words stretches a negative space, full of unspoken meanings. As long as there is an “us” and “them,” there will always be an “other.”

So how do we close the distance?

As a writer here at Oxfam, I’m sort of stuck between two worlds. My job is to get people in the US to care about–to fight for–people they may never have met, with whom they may have little in common on the surface. I don’t know what it’s like to be an alpaca herder living at 16,000 feet up in Peru, or a struggling rice farmer in Senegal. But by meeting these people and documenting their stories, we writers try to cross the chasm between the people on the ground and our audience. Our goal is to turn the “us” and “them” into a shared story of human experience.

But sometimes words fall short: they’re ambiguous, after all, and weighted with readers’ own perceptions.

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