Golnar Motevalli – The Washington Post – Sunday 26 April, 2009

KABUL (Reuters) – Afghan President Hamid Karzai told women activists Sunday he had signed a law that caused an international outcry over its effect on women’s rights because he had not read it properly, the activists said.

Karzai has ordered the Justice Ministry to review the Shi’ite Personal Status Law, which he signed two months ago.

The law, which applies to a Shi’ite Muslim community that makes up about 15 percent of the population, requires women to satisfy their husbands’ sexual desires, which some critics say could be used to justify marital rape.

It sparked an outcry from leaders of Western countries with troops in Afghanistan, including U.S. President Barack Obama who called it “abhorrent.” A group of 30 women parliamentarians and rights advocates met Karzai Sunday to discuss it. . .

. . . read complete article . . .
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IRIN humanitarian news – Tuesday 30 Dec, 2008

The stigma of being a widow in Nepal can be overwhelming, even more so when you are young

RAJBIRAJ, 30 December 2008 (IRIN) – At the age of 11 Purni Shah was forced by her family to marry a 25-year-old man. Four years into the marriage, her husband died leaving her a child widow.

Her fate is not uncommon in Nepal, which has one of world’s highest levels of child marriage, according to Nepal’s Demographic Health Survey. Over 63 percent of girls marry before 18, and 7 percent marry before reaching 10, the survey said.

But for those who become widows, the stigma can be overwhelming: They are often looked upon with disdain and suspicion, and even blamed for their husband’s death. . .

. . . read complete article . . .
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Helping families grow corn and other crops on small farms in Zimbabwe is crucial for improving the supply of food.

By Chris Hufstader

Following the political news in Africa is hard from a distance, but if you are like me and you need to keep up on what is happening on this vast, diverse, and fascinating continent there are a few good resources for news. One is allafrica.com, a site that aggregates news and commentary from African newspapers and other sources, so you can get news on Africa by Africans. 
The allafrica.com site has been particularly useful the past few weeks as South Africa’s African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela, asked President Thabo Mbeki to step down from office because he had allegedly meddled in a corruption investigation of his political rival Jacob Zuma. (Zuma figured into an article I wrote about the HIV/AIDS crisis and women’s rights in South Africa two years ago .)
Zuma is maneuvering to become the next president, and ousting Mbeki seemed at first to strengthen his position, until some members of Mbeki’s cabinet resigned (including a well-regarded finance minister), sending the stock market down and raising a lot of questions about the political stability of Africa’s largest economy. (Many of the cabinet members later said they resigned out of courtesy, but would be willing to continue their work.) Archbishop Desmond Tutu has spoken out critically about the ANC’s internal coup, and said such methods threaten to turn South Africa into a “banana republic.” He is probably not the only one concerned about changes in the conduct of politics in this important country.
Another useful resource is the UN’s Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN), which has a distinctively humanitarian focus since it is run by UN’s OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs). This week I checked out two stories related to the political scene in southern Africa about Zimbabwe, which recently concluded a power-sharing deal between the ZANU-PF party led by President Robert Mugabe and the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai. This deal was just recently brokered by Thabo Mbeki, incidentally, and opens the door for humanitarian organizations to restart their badly needed programs to help the country improve its food supply in a precarious economy.
One IRIN story describes research by the University of the Western Cape in South Africa showing that small-scale agriculture is essential to improve the supply of food for poor people in the country,  which supports Oxfam’s approach to the food crisis in Zimbabwe and many other places. (I visited some small-scale farmers in the Zimbabwe’s northeast district of Mudzi in 2006 .) The IRIN report also says the research  indicates that the fast-track land reform program in Zimbabwe has not been the total failure its critics have alleged, at least in Masvingo province where the study was focused. I’d be interested in hearing a critique of this finding!
The other story about Zimbabwe that IRIN sent out the same day said that five children died in Masvingo province from severe malnutrition-related illnesses. These were just five of the 3.8 million people in the country who will require food aid in the next month, which makes it imperative that humanitarian organizations be allowed to get back to work immediately .

Mud lies sticky and thick around them as Natalie Bergeron catches up with a resident of Isle de Jean Charles. Photo by Kenny Rae

Natalie Bergeron, a lifelong bayou resident, has been delivering mail down in Cocodrie, Louisiana, for 30 years. She knows just about everybody in the water-logged town, which was battered by wind from Hurricane Gustav and then swamped by the storm surge from Hurricane Ike. And what she knows about them—and plenty of others along the road from Bourg through Chauvin and into Cocodrie—is worrying her.

“Not only do we have poor people trying to live, we’ve lost four factories in Chauvin. One was a huge shrimp processing factory. Gustav tore it apart,” she said over the phone as she ate her lunch. It was 2 p.m., and the first occasion she’d found that day for a meal break. Things have been busy at Bayou Grace, the community services organization in Chauvin where Bergeron works, since the storms swept through, knocking out water and power supplies. Bayou Grace is one of the local organizations Oxfam America partners with.

Bergeron tallied up the other hits local employment has taken since Labor Day: All told, she estimated the storms wiped out about 300 jobs—on boats, docks, and in factories—and those were just the ones she knew about in Chauvin.

“People are kind of numb right now, and not sure what to do next,” said Bergeron.

That’s the big question: What next? Do people stay? Do they go?

“They would love to move away,” said Bergeron, but they’re afraid they wouldn’t be able to get very much money for their low-lying lots—not the amount developers can command when they buy them up and sell them off again. And no one’s received enough money from Louisiana’s Road Home plan—the state’s housing recovery program—to afford a relocation, she added.

“They are literally stuck,” said Bergeron.

So, storm after storm, the folks of Cocodrie and Chauvin do what they can: They muck out their homes and move back in. But how much longer they can keep that up is unclear. Ike shoved water all the way from the Gulf of Mexico right up into Bergeron’s street in Bourg, one of the highest points on the bayou. Never in the 15 years she has lived there has her street flooded.

“For us to get water like that is scary,” said Bergeron, adding that patience has done little to assuage anyone’s fears. “We keep waiting for the federal government to protect us—if they would just rebuild the barrier islands to be a storm buffer. But all we hear is study, study, study—and they do nothing.”

Chris Hufstader met a man who wants to help young people embrace their culture as a means to improve their lives and defeat discrimination. Here’s what he learned.

It was near some mountain-side fields in Cusco, Peru, that I met Zenon Pumallica Coyori. When I look at his photo–above, another one taken by Evan Abramson–I see a modern descendent of the ancient Inca Empire.

It is a face of great experience. Coyori says he does not really know how old he is, but is willing to estimate 64 years. He was orphaned when he was young, so he says, “I copied the birth day of a friend who was the same size as me.”

Coyori says surviving as a farmer in the highlands is not easy, but the indigenous people have developed ways of working and living that make it possible. The only problem is that many are no longer using their traditional practices, because they have been made to feel inferior and therefore neglect their culture. So Coyori is working with Oxfam’s partner in Cusco, Peru, the Centro “Bartolome de las Casas” (CBC) to change that. Here are some of the lessons he shares:

Memory: Coyori says that people’s awareness of themselves and their place in Quechua culture affects “our ability to plan, and put our lives in order. We have to transmit our knowledge to each other and understand the past to understand the present and the future.” Participants in CBC’s program must develop their own life story, so they understand who they are and where they come from.

Live Well: “Our families and children must be corrected when they make a mistake. We see a lot of infidelity now, married people having relations with others, and children are abandoned. This brings conflict and violence, and a bad life. It is not a correct way of living, and the children learn these things and reproduce the behavior themselves.”

Work Well: Coyori encourages a strong work ethic: “And we don’t work just to work, we honor the gods of the mountains, our apus, and before we start our work we give them gifts of coca, sweets, cigarettes, cloth, corn, flowers…” Part of the CBC project is to encourage communities to re-awaken the ancient Quechua values of ayni and minka, forms of reciprocity, so farmers can help one another with their work and collective community improvement projects.

Elders like Coyori can also impart indigenous knowledge such as when to plant potatoes: “We listen to the fox, if it howls slowly then we do not plant… If it howls strongly, that is the right moment. We also look at the panchi flower, when it opens it is the right moment to plant…if it opens half way we wait to plant our seeds.”

Coyori is enthusiastic about sharing knowledge with young people, and he seized on the opportunity to work with CBC in order to learn to read and write Quechua.  But he also wants young people to understand their rights and have pride in their culture because when he was a teenager in the 50s he experienced racism and discrimination.

“I was an orphan and I lived on a hacienda. One week a month I had to work for free as an obligation because I lived on the landlord’s land. I cleaned out pig pens and was fed rotten potatoes, food for a dog… I thought, ‘this is not a life…is it possible some day we will have rights?’”

Ligia Alencastre, a program officer at CBC, says the project will build new leadership skills in young people. “We want them to have self-esteem, and demand respect for their rights, be an owner of his or her culture, help the community value itself, and walk with pride when they go out of their community,” said Alencastre.

On a field visit to Louisiana following Hurricane Gustav, Oxfam America’s Kenny Rae saw what can grow out of offering the right support at the right time. Here’s his story.

Three years ago in Biloxi, Miississippi, Oxfam America made an unusual grant following Hurricane Katrina. We gave Hands On, a group that mobilizes volunteers to undertake cleanup and rebuilding, money to purchase a mini excavator.
FEMA had claimed that it could not deliver desperately needed trailers to those who’d lost their houses until their yards were cleared of debris. Fifty Hands On volunteers were working from dawn until dusk cutting trees and moving rubble to facilitate this.  The addition of the excavator eased their work considerably, speeding the cleanup and denying FEMA an excuse for delays in delivery of the trailers.
In the days following Katrina, Oxfam America worked with Bill Stallworth, the city councilor for East Biloxi, to set up a coordination center that would serve as the focal point of those arriving to help with relief and reconstruction.
Fast forward three years to Hurricane Gustav, which spared Biloxi but slammed into some of the bayous of coastal Louisiana. Outside the fire station in Little Caillou in Terrebonne Parish, my colleague and I were monitoring the distribution of water and ice.   Glancing across the parking lot I saw a trailer with—yes—the excavator from Biloxi. My colleague was unconvinced, but the now- faded Oxfam sticker on the machine confirmed my story.
It had arrived in Little Caillou, courtesy of volunteers working with the Hope Coordination Center—the facility Oxfam had helped launch back in Biloxi in 2005. It is now well-established and houses a number of groups involved in the reconstruction of that city. Biloxi had been bracing itself for Gustav. But when it became clear that the storm would spare the cityand hit the coastal areas of Louisiana, the center mobilized a team to help its neighbors to the west.  The team was made up of volunteers from Hope Force and Hands On Gulf Coast, which brought along its excavator.
In addition to cleaning up debris scattered by Gustav, the team is focusing on installing tarps on the damaged roofs of houses. And Oxfam is supporting this endeavor by providing tarps and funds to support the volunteers’ transport and food costs.
It was great to see partners that we’d supported following one disaster not only thriving in their own community, but having grown enough to be able to help those in another state in their time of need.

On the bayous of southern Louisiana, Oxfam America’s Kenny Rae confronts the full scope of Hurricane Gustav’s destruction. Here’s his account.

The atmosphere in the Gumbo Shop, a long-established restaurant in New Orleans’ French Quarter, was celebratory. And so it should be. The city, so traumatized by  Hurricane Katrina three years ago had,  despite dire predictions, been spared the wrath of Hurricane Gustav, which had veered westward before making landfall. The whole city had evacuated, but now people were coming back, and getting on with their lives again.
The near normalcy of New Orleans seemed a world apart from where I’d been just the evening before. Barely 100 miles away, Isle de Jean Charles, a bayou community of 220 Native Americans in Terrebonne Parish, had not been as lucky.
My first attempt, two days after the hurricane to get to Isle de Jean Charles was a bit harrowing. The causeway that leads to the island was, in many places, underwater. My colleague Kate and I agreed that as long as we could see the road marking through the water we would continue. We used our satellite phone to check with  the Coast Guard, and were relieved to learn that high tide had just passed.  We drove as far as we could: to the edge of the village. From there, the road was too submerged for our minivan to pass.
The island was eerily silent, populated only by the herons and egrets that perched on poles and fences. The inhabitants had left under a mandatory evacuation order. It was painfully clear that many of the inhabitants would not have homes to return to. Learning from previous flooding, some residents had hoisted their mobile homes onto raised platforms. But Gustav had ripped through many of these homes, stripping off their cladding and carrying away their contents, leaving only a skeletal frame. One house was washed off by the tidal surge and now lay at a 45-degree angle on a sadly ineffective earthen levee built to protect the village.
Three days later, I returned to Isle de Jean Charles after the flood water subsided. My guide was Natalie, a local mail carrier who also runs a wellness program for an organization called Bayou Grace Community Services, one of Oxfam’s partners. My worst fears were confirmed: The wind and water had completely destroyed house after house.
Life was better here once, Natalie told me. A good living could be made from shrimp fishing supplemented by cattle rearing. But then came cheaper farmed shrimp and large boats, pushing out the smaller fishermen. And coastal erosion has eaten away at the grazing land that once supported cattle. 
I’m not sure what it will take for the community of Isle de Jean Charles to survive.  After Hurricane Rita, church groups built two houses that weathered this storm largely unscathed. These are solid structures, built on raised platforms by teams of volunteers. There is talk now of groups getting together to build 25 of these ”lift houses” to replace those lost, but it is far from clear where the money will come from to support this project. And with Hurricane Ike now set to bring devastation to Texas, the needs of Louisiana’s bayou dwellers risk getting lost in the deluge of news about another disaster–even as Ike’s storm surge swells toward Louisiana again.

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.

They greet you as you come in the door, these portraits do, smiling but silent, made formal by the click of a shutter. And though they are quiet, their placement there, for all to see, speaks volumes—about love and pride and the bonds that hold families tight, regardless of the hardships they suffer.

On the grounds of the Sri Sumangala Temple in Mawella South, near Tangalle, stands a monument—a golden globe held aloft by a spray of golden arms and hands rising from a pedestal set with many small rectangles of black stone. Etched into each rectangle is a portrait—photographic in its exactitude. These are pictures of people killed by the tsunami when it hit the temple barely 150 yards from the beach. Many of those memorialized here are children.

As I studied their faces—a quirky smile here, a tilt of the head there, a wrinkled brow—I wondered how they could look so alive, so individual. And then I remembered the photographs—treasured and now, for some families, irreplaceable–I had seen on the walls of homes. Portraits like them served this monument-maker well. And finally I understood why family pictures seemed to take such a prominent place in people’s houses: Someday those portraits may be all that a family has left by which to remember a child, a spouse, a parent. For many vulnerable people, that’s a threat that never goes away.

As the storm-wracked coast of Louisiana faces the fallout from another hurricane–with potentially more on the way–Oxfam is supporting our local partner organizations to provide emergency supplies and assistance in rebuilding to those in need.

Inequities and discrimination amid a stalled recovery process have left some people, such as those who have lived in emergency trailers since the 2005 hurricanes, as vulnerable as they were three years ago when Hurricane Katrina struck the region.

Whatever the impact of Hurricane Gustav, policy makers and presidential candidates must commit to a long-term recovery for the Gulf Coast that is just, equitable, and complete.

Donate now to Oxfam America’s Hurricane Gustav Relief and Rehabilitation Fund.

• Read about Oxfam’s Gulf Coast Recovery Program
• View a slideshow of the destruction caused by Hurricane Gustav
• “No one can do it alone: An Oxfam partner tackles hurricane disasters–past, present, and future

Photo by Atul Loke/Panos for Oxfam America

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.”

Sarath himself admitted that he had amassed a collection of 97 bed sheets—bounty doled out by aid groups and well-meaning donors in the weeks and months after the disaster—even though his house had suffered no harm when the waves crashed into his village.

But in another coastal community not so far away exactly the opposite outcome has changed the way Krishanthi (pictured above with her daughter), married at 12 and the mother of two children, sees the world and her place in it. For all its terror and heartbreak, the tsunami and its aftermath have opened doors to a whole new life for her.

Taking advantage of countless trainings offered by aid groups—on good governance and women’s rights, on leadership and accounting—Krishanthi has emerged from it all with a fire to share her new knowledge and boost the confidence of others.

Together with her husband, 11 years her senior and supportive of her drive and initiative, Krishanthi built a new house—in a safe location—using funds from an aid group and her family’s own sweat and labor. She has started a small money-lending business with earnings saved from a food-selling enterprise. And a community-based organization she formed has now attracted the membership of women from half the households in her village. Once a shy woman who ventured out little, Krishanthi, at 30, has become a role model for others. Even the men in her community point to her as an example for their wives.

As aid providers, what’s the lesson for us in the stories of these two survivors? Their interactions with the aid world arc between two extremes—the worst and the best—spanning a sea of human experiences, each one different, each one true. We were there to listen and learn. What went right? What went wrong? How can we do it better next time?

Women in a coir pit in Sri Lanka work with the fiber from coconut shells. Photo by Atul Loke/Panos for Oxfam America

Click here: coir1. 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.

Since the tsunami in 2004, when the industry suffered heavy damages, Oxfam has been helping coir workers here and in other coastal villages recover from their losses, organize themselves, and find new ways of marketing their products.

When it comes to coconuts, you get the sense that little goes to waste here. Coconut shells become serving spoons. Palm fronds become roofing materials. Sap becomes syrup. And coconut “milk,” clear as water with a hint of sweetness, is the favored drink on a hot afternoon—and certainly a superior choice to the concoction we toted in our sticky bottles. Warned about Sri Lanka’s sweltering climate, we came fully equipped with orange-colored, berry-flavored “portable electrolyte hydration” packets. How silly. And we knew it the moment the women of Bambaranda passed us golden yellow coconuts, their tops lopped off and a straw bobbing in the cool milk inside. Gatorade has nothing over a King coconut.

“Disaster happens whenever you travel,” said Nazareth, our circumspect colleague. “It’s a matter of coping.”

He was talking about Miriam, Oxfam America’s public health specialist, sprawled in the front seat of the truck. She looked pale and a little sweaty. And she was praying for a pit stop.

Was it the salad from the night before that was causing all the trouble? A sip of dirty water? Memories of roasted camel? Whatever it was, it was making her the sickest she had ever been—no easy feat for a medical doctor who delights in all local cuisines and has worked in Nepal, Tanzania, Mozambique, Chad, Sudan, India, El Salvador, and Peru.

“Funky stomach, that’s what I call it,” said Emily, a humanitarian livelihoods specialist. “It happens all the time. Think of it as a weight-loss plan.”

We were 10 people bouncing in two four-wheel-drive vehicles down the ribbon of tar that stretches through Ethiopia from Addis Ababa to the Kenyan border, and the night before we had been a cheerful lot, looking forward to a week in the field working on a project to detect early signs of the trouble drought brings.

But today? Things were not so good. On a trip like this, easing the misery of one becomes the mission of all.

We pulled into Dilla. It was 8:30 a.m. and our plan was to take a break from the bouncing, find a bathroom that was more than a bush, and pump Miriam full of an Abyssinian potion sure to cure all that ailed her. We located just the place: an outdoor café with a tiled hallway leading to indoor “facilities.” Never mind that the stench at the end of the hall was enough to make you heave. Miriam was just happy to have a door that shut.

Less successful was the potion—a sticky mix of finely ground coffee beans and honey chased with a bottle of Ambo, Ethiopia’s own fizzy water. None of it stayed down.

Still, Miriam had taken Nazareth’s admonition to heart. She was going to cope. But now it was time to try a western strategy: pills. So, off an obliging trio went in search of the right ones to pop. They soon returned with a fistful of 30—some for the cramping, some for the vomiting, and all for just 10 birr, or about $1.

Two hours later, with Miriam on the mend, we hit the road again, marveling at the power of a buck in Ethiopia and all the medicine it can buy.

“That anti-cramping stuff is good,” said Miriam sinking back into the front seat. “I’m going to bring some home.”

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.

For anyone wondering about the way we really live in the US, “The Measure of America” serves as a call to action. The report takes tools long used to analyze developing countries and applies them here, creating a rank for each state, congressional district, and ethnic group in the US. You can view the complete report here.

In the meantime, these statistics from the study might get you thinking about the vast disparities that now define our country:
 
• Out of total population of 305 million Americans, 80 million of them are unable to generate enough income to meet their basic needs.

• The top 1 percent of households holds one-third of America’s wealth. The bottom 60 percent of households only holds 4 percent of all wealth.

• The real value of minimum wage has decreased by 40 percent in the past 40 years.

• In 2006, 4.5 million young people between the ages of 18 and 24 were not in school, not working, and had not graduated from high school.

• While the US will spend $230 million on health care in the next hour, 47 million Americans remain uninsured.

• African Americans today have a lifespan shorter than the average American in the late 1970s.

Here’s what’s in our fridge at the moment: red leaf lettuce, carrots, garlic scapes, spinach, broccoli, onions, parsley, basil, turnips, and radishes—all grown at a farm down the road in which we have bought a share. It’s part of a movement called community-supported agriculture. And judging by the waiting list of people who would like to join the initiative in our Massachusetts town, supporting small farms is smart way to get food—whether you live in one of the richest countries in the world or one of the poorest.

But for some reason, that’s a simple lesson governments seem to have forgotten about—at a terrible cost to millions of people who are now struggling in the face of a global food crisis. Hunger and increasing poverty in poor countries are the price for the failure of world governments to invest in small-scale agriculture. There are about 400 million smallholder farmers in developing countries, yet international aid to agriculture dropped by almost half between 1980 and 2005.

Where investments are made, wonders can grow.

Just ask Dedefi Dalacha, a farmer in central Ethiopia. Through an Oxfam-supported program, he now has access to a steady supply of water with which to irrigate a field behind his house. Cabbage, onions, and carrots all grow in enough abundance that he can afford to send all his children to school. He’s shown in the picture above with his wife, Safaye Bediya, in their field. The project is helping 68 households work 61 acres of land. Instead of one harvest a year, farmers now get two.

Want to know more about how to solve the global food crisis? Click here.

For Sharon Hanshaw, this is not just a table, it’s a piece of her family history. Photo by Lily Rodrguez/Oxfam America

Anna Kramer, a writer for Oxfam America, recently made her first visit to the Gulf Coast. Here’s her account of meeting two of the energetic people helping to rebuild the region.

I knew that Biloxi, Mississippi, was one of the US cities hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina. But I was surprised to see so many signs of the storm still lingering today—especially in lower-income East Biloxi, where many people still lack permanent housing. A lot of local businesses stand empty, and despite some growth, you can sense that the community is still struggling to heal itself.

But there was one thing from my visit that left me feeling hopeful: seeing Sharon Hanshaw get her table back.

Sharon, who lost her house, her car, and her business in the hurricane, now heads the Oxfam partner organization Coastal Women for Change (CWC). As a leader in rebuilding her community, she always has a lot to do, but the day I met her there was one thing she couldn’t miss: picking up her table at 3 p.m. sharp.

As we sat together in her living room, Sharon explained that the only piece of furniture she salvaged after Katrina was a majestic wood dining table that belonged to her mother. The recovered table was a sorry sight: its wood finish dulled, its surface splintered. She repaired it with Gorilla Glue, which hardened in yellow, bulgy ridges. “It was ugly,” she said, laughing. “My daughters told me to throw it away.”

Still, Sharon kept the table with her during her 18 months in a government-issued FEMA trailer. When she moved into her current home—a two-story house with sun-flooded skylights and cocoa-colored walls—the table came too. Except there it looked even shabbier than ever.

When a friend recommended a family-owned furniture restorer’s shop in Biloxi, Sharon finally agreed to part with the table for a little while. And today it was ready at last.

Sharon’s friend and colleague Cass Woods was on hand to transport the table in her pickup. As we drove over, Sharon couldn’t resist calling her: “Well? How does it look?”

“It’s okay,” Cass said neutrally. Sharon sighed.

When we arrived at the restorer’s, a low brick building with the name hand-painted on the window, Sharon jumped out of the car and left the engine running. Then I heard her scream—in joy, or in horror?

Rounding the corner, I glimpsed the table in the back of Cass’ truck, its shiny surface gleaming in the hot sunshine. Up close, the mahogany-colored wood showed a smooth, slightly rippled pattern, like the peaceful waters of the Gulf.

Sharon was crying and hugging Cass, scolding her friend good-naturedly for her deception. Beaming, she jumped on the truck to pose for a photo with her prize (above).

Meanwhile, two middle-aged furniture restorers stood watching in the doorway. I saw one of them turn to the other, puzzled by Sharon’s reaction.

“It’s all she had left,” the second man said quietly.

His colleague nodded in understanding. In a place like Biloxi, that’s all you need to say.

Chris Hufstader, a senior writer at Oxfam America, drinks buckets of tea every day.  But he knows a good thing when he sees–and tastes–it, as his experience in Yirgachafee proves.

Yirgachafee, in Ethiopia, is one of those places all avid coffee drinkers should visit. I went there with my colleague Doe-e Berhanu on the way back from southern Oromia last January, so we could visit a growers cooperative in the small village of Werka, well off the main road in some of the most beautiful hills and forests in the country. You can read Doe-e’s story about the Werka coop here.

After a quick tour of the coop’s processing plant, where we saw the beans being sorted by hand, we stopped at the home of Tadelech Gisso for a proper coffee ceremony. The green coffee beans were roasted over a fire, ground by hand, brewed in a traditional pot, and served in small cups with sprigs of wild herbs. Part of the charm of the coffee ceremony is that it takes time, so people have chance to talk and get to know each other—very different from the mad dash into the corner Starbucks for a cup gulped down on the fly as most Americans seem to enjoy their brew.

While we waited I attempted to get to know a toddler who had apparently never seen a white person before and kept wandering in to the round, thatch-roofed house, looking at me, and screaming in terror and running back out as the coop members roared in laughter. I felt bad that this entertainment seemed to be at the little girl’s expense, but by the end we seemed to move her from fright to mere curiosity.

The coffee was rich and aromatic, and I loved it. But probably not half as much as our photographer Petterik Wiggers, a Dutch man living in Ethiopia who puts away about 10 cups of espresso each day. He was really beside himself, and thoroughly photographed the sorting, the coffee ceremony, and a visit to the farms up in the hills that afternoon. 

It was a real coffee drinker’s heaven.

Here are a few of Petterik’s photos. You can see the beans being roasted and pounded, and the final product being poured and enjoyed. There is even a self-portrait of the photojournalist himself.

Katie Taft is the regional communications officer for Oxfam America in its East Asia office in Phnom Penh. Here is her account about one way to predict the size of a harvest.

Groundhog Day is the one holiday when Americans put their faith into a small furry creature to tell them if winter will last six more weeks, or if they will finally see the sunshine melt the snow away. But we all know that it is only a bit of superstitious fun.

I am thinking of this holiday as I push my way through throngs of schoolchildren waving small Cambodian flags and holding plastic flowers to cheer on the sacred cows that are making their way a second time around the Royal Palace lawn.

This is the Royal Ploughing Ceremony. It marks the start of the planting season in Cambodia. After circling the palace lawn three times – possibly working up a hunger – the cows are led to seven dishes which each contain something different: rice, corn, beans, sesame, grass, water, or alcohol. Depending on what and how much the cows eat during this ancient ceremony, their consumption predicts which crops will have the best harvest.

As I watch the cows get hitched to fancy, gold-embossed plows, I am thinking that Americans aren’t the only ones to rest their futures on an animal’s actions.

As the cows approach the food a hush falls over the crowd. Several old women place their palms together and begin moving their mouths in silent prayer. The silence is loud. To the Cambodians this is no light affair. Even when one of the cows breaks loose from its handler, there is no snickering.

I wonder if this year people are taking the ceremony more seriously. In the past six months good-grade rice — Cambodia’s staple food — has nearly doubled in price and all over Phnom Penh people are talking about it.

I ask the old woman standing next to me what she is thinking and she that sacred cows are about to tell her if she will be able to deal with the price increase.

“I pray that the cows go to the rice because it will be good for my fields,” she says. “Everything becomes more expensive. I need that rice.”

I am dripping with sweat in the glaring 8 a.m. sun and thinking about the work that Oxfam America already is doing to help people grow more food. As I watch King Norodom Sihamoni of Cambodia make his royal gesture to the sacred cows, I am thinking that maybe the whole food price issue is only a hyped media story and will blow over in a few months. While I listen to the Buddhist monks chant for the cows over a load speaker, I am thinking that it has yet to be seen what the impact of this type of price increase will have on Cambodia. As the beautiful women dance and throw flowers in front of the cows, I am thinking that one thing is certain: If the food price issue isn’t media hype it will be the poor who are hit the hardest by it.

Minutes later, Cambodia’s royal cows predict the country will have quite a good rice harvest in six months time. Next the cows eat some corn and beans, indicating those too will have good yields. The cows do not go anywhere near the alcohol, which I think is a good sign. But the cows do not drink any water, which according to the tradition means drought ahead.

A week after the prediction, Ethiopia announces that because of a drought hitting parts of the country, 4.6 million of its people—up from 2.2 million earlier this year—now need emergency assistance and 75,000 of the children there are suffering from acute malnutrition.

In the wake of the news reports about Ethiopia, I am left thinking that maybe a holiday where animals make predictions for us has a higher purpose than just a bit of fun or some pomp and circumstance. Like Americans putting their faith into a small animal to bring them sunshine, the Cambodians put their faith into two large animals to bring them food. Maybe it is meant to build the spirits and confidence of the people to move forward with their lives no matter what challenges lie ahead. And that is not such a bad thing when faced with a possible shortage of food.

So I am hoping that the cows know more than I think. Cambodia is counting on it. After all, they did pick the rice over the alcohol.

Chris Hufstader, Senior Writer for Oxfam America, visited a health clinic in rural North West province South Africa to learn how it collaborates with a local community organization to fight HIV and AIDS.

When you read about the rate of infection of HIV in South Africa, the numbers are hard to comprehend. It is the country with the most people in the world living with HIV and AIDS: nearly 5.5 million of the country’s total population of 48 million. In some parts of the country one in five is infected.

South Africa’s North West province is one of the places with a high rate of HIV infection. The area I visited was not far from Pretoria and Johannesburg, on the border with Botswana. We visited a local community organization called Pholo Modi Wa Sechaba that provides essential services for infected and affected people. You can read my story about this visit here.

There was another facet of this story that I wanted to describe: the way Pholo Modi Wa Sechaba and its home-based care givers work closely with the clinic in an area called Sandfontein. “They play a liaison role between us and the community,” said Lulu Sitsila, the head nurse, pictured above with Gerard Payne of the AIDS Consortium. She added that the care givers are essential for the survival of many of the 1,500 patients they see each month. With only 12 nurses on staff, they need the help the care givers provide in the homes. “We can only concentrate on clinical work here,” she said.

The Sandfontein clinic serves 65,000 people in four villages. There is supposed to be a doctor working at the clinic one day a month, but Nurse Sitsila said they have not seen a doctor there for six months. She said most are not interested in working in rural clinics like this one.

The clinic struggles to meet the needs of all the people in the area, especially those who only seek medical treatment for the first time in the later stages of the disease. Some families turn to traditional healers first, and this puts them in even more danger. “People who get traditional medicines from families advance quickly,” said Nurse Sitsila. “By the time they come to the clinic they are very sick.”

Itumeleng Modimola, the 34-year-old manager if Pholo Modi Wa Sechaba, said their outreach work in the community has taught many people that sick family members, especially women, must go for immediate health care at clinics and or a hospital for HIV/AIDS. “Women are no longer oppressed by this culture,” she said, raising some skepticism from the visitors at the clinic that day. “Maybe [only] 10 percent now.” She credited a concerted effort in the community and at the clinic to counsel people living with HIV and AIDS to get proper treatment. “People living with HIV and AIDS encourage others, particularly mothers, to stop saying it is witchcraft, and now things have changed.”

The clinic counts on Pholo Modi Wa Sechaba to help counsel patients, and encourage those who need medication to come to the clinic and get on antiretroviral treatment. Helping people understand their treatment options is essential, and it is a function with which the government health system struggles.

“We can never function without them,” Nurse Sitsila said. “We don’t have extra hands and ears in the community, but since we now have these home-based care workers, we are functioning much better.”

By Coco McCabe

This is a plug for good reading–and good rearing.

It’s about a book on Africa. A book that will help plant your feet on the ground there, even if you can’t visit, and make you keen on an upbringing awash in the ways of other cultures.

The book is Peter Godwin’s Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa. It’s a memoir about his childhood in Rhodesia–now Zimbabwe–and his friendships with black Africans as the country slipped into chaos.

I had finished reading it just before having a check-up at a medical clinic near home in preparation for a field visit. The doctor I saw was a young woman–the mother of two small daughters–and when she learned I was headed to Ethiopia, her eyes lit up. She was going to Kenya, she said. She was packing her whole family up and taking off for two years to serve as a medical doctor at a missionary hospital in Kenya’s western highlands where about 600,000 Kipsigis depend on the hospital for primary care.

Why, some of her friend asked, would she want to do that?

Wouldn’t she be sorry about all the things her daughters would miss here?

She laughed at the memory of those questions.

For some people, the answers are probably hard to fathom. But if they’d read Godwin’s book, they’d get an idea of the gifts this doctor is giving her girls–the gift of understanding other people, gleaned from the everyday experience of living, and the gift of a broader world view, of perspective.

Those can be hard things to come by here. But they’re increasingly important, especially as the world shrinks and we come to realize that our neighbors are not so far away–that a cyclone in Myanmar can leave people as devastated as a hurricane on the Gulf Coast here, that the sorrow of mothers and fathers in China who lost their only children in the recent earthquake is universal, that the biofuel we pump into our cars is pushing the price of food out of reach for people in poor countries.

In Peter Godwin’s book, a white boy comes of age in a country consumed by civil war at the tail end of the colonial era. The book is about that war. But it’s also about Godwin’s clear-eyed understanding of, and love for, many of the people around him–sensibilities that will forever inform his way of looking at the world.

And that’s just what this doctor is ordering for her two young daughters: good medicine.

by Coco McCabe

A few mornings ago, when a fire ripped through an electrical substation, the power blinked off in my community. Across town, everything came to a standstill. They even cancelled school: “I had no way to feed 1,200 kids and we didn’t have enough bread for sandwiches,” the school superintendent was quoted as saying.

Six hours without power—how inconvenient. But that’s all it was. A hiccup, and nearly forgotten the next day.

But I wondered how we would all manage if the power went out at least twice a week, from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., as it has these past several months in neighborhoods across Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. Oxfam has a regional office there that’s been trying to help pastoralist communities across the country snared in an emergency. Drought has left them facing both hunger and thirst.

The Oxfam office is in a building with a generator that kicks in when the city’s juice switches off. But it can’t run around the clock—and sometimes, it doesn’t run at all.

“One day, the power went out, the generator broke down, and we were in the middle of responding to a drought emergency—no phones, no faxes, no computers,” said Doe-e Berhanu, Oxfam’s regional communications officer. And communications between the Addis office and a satellite bureau in the northern part of the country are often slow because there just isn’t enough electricity in that remote region to speed them up.

Late rain is the culprit, said Berhanu. Addis and other parts of the country depend on hydropower, and if the rains don’t come, the electricity doesn’t flow.

The equation is so simple, but the consequences are profound—and go beyond interruptions on the electrical grid. It’s one thing to live without Internet access, but quite another to turn on the tap and find not a drop dribbling out because of a severe water shortage.

That’s been happening in Addis. It was a problem last year, and water rationing in different neighborhoods continues, said Berhanu, who has perfected the art of sponge bathing. When the taps run dry, her father gathers up the family’s collection of jerricans—big plastic containers that hold about five gallons each—loads them into his pickup truck and drives around to find a neighborhood whose water supply hasn’t yet been shut off. There, at a kiosk set up next to an open pipe, he’ll get in line with everyone else and wait to fill the jugs. The longer the line grows, the higher the price of water climbs. Last year, Berhanu’s family went for two weeks straight without running water in their house and so far this year, they’ve gone without for four weeks.

That challenge pales, though, when you consider what people in southern Ethiopia were doing earlier this year to cope with the drought that gripped their region. One of Oxfam’s partners reported that women, some of them pregnant, were walking more than 18 miles from their villages to fetch water for their families. Laden with 20-liter (five-gallon) jugs, some of them miscarried, and others delivered their babies along the road.

I think about that morning when the power in my town went out and the news of the inconvenience made big local headlines. What in the world were we complaining about?