Toxic Harvest

By Anna Kramer

Turns out it’s not only unhealthy to smoke tobacco—it’s also unhealthy to pick it. Check out these details from my colleague Coco’s story about the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC)  an Oxfam-funded group  that advocates for better working conditions for US tobacco workers. When FLOC president Baldemar Velasquez spent a day in the fields with tobacco pickers in North Carolina, he found that picking can be hazardous to your health:

Coated with nicotine that easily soaks through clothing and gloves, [tobacco leaves] are the source of “the green monster,”—a temporary sickness that strikes many workers laboring in the hot sun.
“Like poison ivy, you catch it through the skin. It’s like a serious flu. You start vomiting,” said Velasquez, adding that pesticides sprayed on the leaves can compound the effects of the illness. Farm workers wear long sleeves and pants to protect themselves as best they can. But when the leaves are wet with rain or dew, the nicotine sinks through quickly. On those days, workers will often don makeshift rain coats fashioned from garbage bags for a bit of extra protection. But there’s a personal cost to that, too: They’re sweltering.

It’s worth noting that most pickers earn less than $7,500 a year, and receive little protection from these unsafe working conditions. FLOC and other groups are trying to bring tobacco companies to the negotiating table to get the workers a better deal.

For now, I sent this story to a close friend who’s a smoker, hoping that it might make him think a little more about the consequences of putting these chemicals inside his lungs. And I wasn’t just being sanctimonious—I quit smoking almost one year ago (October 22, 2007, to be exact) so I know that every last bit of motivation helps. Though my friend smokes “all-natural” tobacco, as I did, I don’t think it makes much difference; pesticides or not, smoking is still toxic, at both ends of the consumer chain.

36 Hours in Phnom Penh

A woman rides her motor bike through the crowded streets of Phnom Penh. Photo by Brett Eloff/Oxfam America

By Andrea Perera

 

Last June, I spent my final night in Cambodia taking in the sunset over the Mekong River. We had just returned from a grueling trip to interview traditional gold miners in Mondulkiri province; I was covered in dust, sore from the motorbike ride, and generally ready to sleep on a hotel mattress.

 

But, I’d had so much fun on the trip, whipping through the forests, slipping up through dry creek beds, I was feeling a surprising bit of apprehension about going home. So, in an effort to eke out one last memorable evening, I agreed to stop in Phnom Penh at what the locals called Snowy’s bar. This is where all my expat friends said they went to chill out and escape the constant hustle and bustle of city life. After the trip I’d just been on, and three weeks in general running around the region, I understood the allure. Perched on a stool on the open-air deck, I watched the boats float by and the sky turn a soft shade of orange.

 

Soon, Snowy himself came out to chat with his customers. And the chatter turned to a recent visit by the New York Times. A reporter was doing a “36 Hours in Phnom Penh” travel feature. And Snowy’s – or Maxine’s Pub as the sign says – was about to get discovered … much to the locals’ chagrin.

 

A couple months later, I’m back in Boston, and my life is back to its normal 9-5 routine. No exciting trips abroad. No drinks on the riverfront on the other side of the world. As a creature of habit and a homebody, that suits me just fine. But when the Times finally published its 36 Hours article recently, reading it made me miss that other life.

 

I always struggle to capture what it’s like to travel for Oxfam; maybe it’s just that I’m on my own, doing things that go against my instincts, taking risks that for me can be big and sometimes scary. Those are the field visits that make up 95 percent of my trip, where I’m reporting on the communities Oxfam is helping, like the rice farmers participating in savings-led microfinance programs in rural Cambodia or the fishermen replanting mangroves along Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.

 

But then there are the hours between the road trips, or the nights before the plane rides, when someone from our local office in Phnom Penh opens up their home or shepherds me around town for food and sight-seeing. Those days, and the ones where I take my backpack and hire a tuk tuk to take me around on my own, those are the ones where I feel less like an outsider looking in, and more like an annual visitor returning to my favorite places.

 

Speaking of favorite places, the Times article captured many of them — from the Russian Market where you can buy anything cheap, to the spa with the best massages, to the museums that convey the history no one should forget. Reading the article, clicking through the photos, brought back memories. And it reminded me of the people I’ve met, who let me into their homes to interview them. Even after I’ve left them, and returned to my air-conditioned office a world away, it’s their stories, their country, that I seek to honor. Most of the time I feel like I’m not doing them justice. But each trip I make, I feel like I learn a little more, and reflect back a better understanding of it all.

The High Price of Stability

Nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina hit, the walls of one of many vacant houses in Biloxi, Mississippi, still bear marks of flood damage from the storm. Photo by Liliana Rodriguez

By Anna Kramer

The US Census Bureau released its 2007 data last week, and tucked in among the facts and figures was one statistic that made headlines: More than 7.5 million Americans–almost 15 percent of American homeowners with a mortgage—are spending half of their income or more on housing.

This issue of housing has been very much on my mind lately. I live in a small apartment in the Boston area, and though my rent isn’t sky-high, it’s not exactly cheap, either. Meanwhile, I’ve recently attended several barbecues at the homes of other 30-something friends and colleagues, where I heard over and over about the perks of homeownership.

For the price of a down payment and a mortgage, I could have a tree-lined backyard, ideal for growing tomatoes, playing croquet, and hosting barbecues. I could paint my walls another color besides white. I wouldn’t wake up to my neighbors inexplicably hammering at 3 a.m. And though my friends didn’t say so, I know there are intangible benefits, too: If you own a house, you’re perceived as a solid citizen, a working adult with a stable future.

But then I think about Biloxi, Mississippi, where I visited Oxfam’s Gulf Coast recovery program in June. Housing is a huge issue there. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita wiped out thousands of affordable houses and apartments in the region, and three years later, only a fraction of those homes are slated to be rebuilt.   The remaining homes have become pricier since the storms, in effect squeezing people out of their own neighborhoods. Despite the efforts of programs like Oxfam’s, many residents are struggling to find a permanent place to live.

And I also think about the tanking US economy, and what those 2007 census numbers really mean: If you’re spending more than half your income just to keep a roof over your head, you probably don’t have a lot left over for other things, like groceries and medical care.

I think about all of this—and I decide that for now, my small apartment looks pretty good. After all, I can always buy earplugs to drown out the hammering.

The Landscape of Maternal Mortality

Traveling with her new baby under her burka, this 25-year-old woman is escorted by her father along the rough roads of Badakshan on her way to a health post two hours away to seek help for the bleeding she has been experiencing. There, she learned she has liver damage and may have problems with future deliveries. Photo by Alix Fazzina

 

Badakhshan, a remote and mountainous province in Afghanistan, has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the world: For every 100,000 live births, 6,500 mothers die. About the time that statistic came across my desk, the New York Times ran a picture on its front page—and several more inside—showing the bone-dry hills and rudimentary living conditions in one of Afghanistan’s poorest provinces: Bamian. The Times story was about the hunger looming over one-quarter of the country’s population, and Oxfam’s warning about a potential humanitarian crisis. Drought, an unusually harsh winter, and a lack of security have all contributed to the food shortage.

Studying the bleak landscape in the newspaper pictures, I thought about maternal mortality in Afghanistan—where a woman dies every 27 minutes from pregnancy-related complications– and in other places, too, far from hospitals or clinics, unattended by doctors, nurses, or midwives. Ethiopia was top on my mind, particularly a parched region in the south where families of herders eke out a living with their cattle and goats. A couple of years ago I had a conversation with a man who grew up there: Kote Ibrahim. Tall and intense, he had come to the Oxfam office in Addis Ababa on a mission of urgency. He was starting a local organization to help poor families in the Liben area and he wanted our support. The people of Liben, he said, were starved for basic services like health care—especially women in labor.

“The clinic is 100 kilometers away,” said Ibrahim. “Many of them die along the road.”

If you look at a map of Ethiopia, you won’t find too many paved roads crisscrossing the country. There’s only one that leads from Addis south to the Kenyan border. Many people beyond the urban areas get about on foot, which means the 100 kilometers Ibrahim referred to could translate into days of travel. Carried on stretchers, women with labor complications often don’t make it.

The maternal mortality rate in Ethiopia is less than half of what it is in Afghanistan, where there are 1,600 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births. And statistically, Badakhshan may be the worst place in the world to give birth. But every labor that ends in death along a dusty track on the way to a distant clinic is just as horrific.

Leaders from around the world are meeting at the United Nations this week to talk about what progress the world has made toward meeting its Millennium Development Goals—a blueprint for fighting global poverty. One of those goals is to reduce by three-quarters the deaths of women during pregnancy and childbirth. The deadline is 2015. We have a long way to go to meet it.

Following the News in Africa

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 .

Storms, Mud, and no Jobs: What’s Next?

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.”

Wise Man of the Mountain

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.

From Katrina to Gustav, This Excavator is Still Chugging

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.

Defeating High Altitude Racism in Peru

Farmers in the Andes Must Overcome More than the Cold, Thin Air to Survive

By Chris Hufstader

For me, working in the Andes has its challenges. Aside from the bad roads in remote areas and the cold, threatening weather, I have a real problem with my head.

I am good up until about 4,000 meters (about 12,000 feet), after that I get some pretty bad headaches. I recently got medication to prevent this altitude sickness.  It held off the headaches, but gives me a tingling sensation in my feet and fingers.

But nothing can take away the sheer beauty of the mountains. The tingling sensation adds to it. The picture here by Evan Abramson captures one scene: it is a group of communal fields on the side of a mountain in Cusco, Peru. One year a family will plant potatoes in one plot, the next another might plant barley. The community then leaves it fallow for five years to restore its fertility, then puts it back in the rotation.

Having grown up at sea level, I could not imagine farming at this altitude. A brisk walk can leave you out of breath and a bit dizzy. But the hard physical labor is just one difficulty: Many Quechua-speaking communities struggle to preserve their way of life in a country that does not respect the languages and culture of indigenous peoples.

“They are dismissed and ignored, in health clinics, schools, banks, in the streets and on buses, and in restaurants,” says Ligia Ligia Alencastre, a program officer at the headquarters of Centro “Bartolome de las Casas” (CBC) in Cusco. She says that pervasive racism and discrimination make many young people shy away from their own culture, purposefully neglecting the traditions and practices that have helped their ancestors survive in this harsh environment.

“It is their survival strategy, their attempt at gaining access to modernity by denying their identity,” says Gonzalo Delgado, Oxfam America’s program director in South America.

The economy of Peru is booming right now, but about half the country lives in poverty and does not share in the economic growth. Most of the poorest people are indigenous people, and I don’t think this is a coincidence. It is a result of racism and discrimination, which over the centuries has succeeded in making people actually think of themselves as inferior to others.

One way of defeating racism is through education, and most importantly, changing the minds of young people. This was the basis of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, and a similar idea of self awareness and empowerment is a key part of the work of CBC in Cusco. You can read my story on CBC’s education program here.

The CBC program is helping Quechua-speaking people understand and claim their human rights, and ensure they get the same education, health care, and other social benefits of the modern state that any citizen deserves. But they also need to keep up their farming practices, which requires respect for their indigenous knowledge and traditions, including when and where to plant barley and potatoes that will grow at a high altitude on the side of a great mountain. Read my next post to see how these traditions are being taught and respected.

Battered Bayous: Gustav and Ike

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.