For the hundreds of thousands of earthquake survivors Oxfam has been working with in camps scattered across the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, now is a time of transition. For more than a year, Oxfam has been providing free chlorinated water—up to 79 million gallons a month—to help prevent the spread of disease by ensuring people had a clean and reliable source for drinking and cooking.
But since mid-February, the organization has begun to hand over that responsibility—along with the collection of solid wastes—to camp committees trained in overseeing water sales, chlorination, and solid waste management. The goal is to empower people to take control of the resource, which also means paying for its use.
Before the January 2010 earthquake, many people paid for their water. The average cost of a five-gallon jug was about 12 cents. In June of last year, the national water authority—DINEPA, or Direction Nationale de l”Eau Potable et de l”Assainissement—asked aid groups like Oxfam to try and find a more sustainable solution to the water supply than trucking it in for free. DINEPA maintains that if aid organizations continue to provide free water, the authority will not be able to build a permanent system.
In supporting DINEPA’s request, Oxfam is also going a step further and ensuring that this transition includes extra benefits for residents: The 12 cents charged for every five-gallon jug includes a fee that will cover the collection of solid waste twice a week in the camps where Oxfam works.
Oxfam is not leaving the camps. As communities assume responsibility for their water and sanitation services, Oxfam will deploy a mobile team of water experts whose job will be to monitor and maintain the infrastructure—the water lines, the taps—and guarantee the quality of services in the camps. Oxfam will also continue to de-sludge the latrines.
And the mobile team will have the ability to intervene if there are new outbreaks of disease in the areas in which Oxfam works. During the recent cholera outbreak, there have been few cases of the deadly waterborne disease in the camps where Oxfam has been present—an indication that its hygiene promotion efforts have been effective.
]]>Sorn says she spends less time weeding her fields than she used to since she started using a mechanical weeding device she helped create with assistance from Oxfam’s partner in Cambodia, RACHANA, an organization based in the southern Takeo province. When farmers use this new tool, they can accomplish in a few hours what used to take them many days.
Oxfam supported RACHANA in designing and testing the mechanical weeders that help farmers grow more rice. Switching to innovative rice-growing systems and using a mechanical weeder can create more than 100 percent gains in production—a huge improvement for small-scale rice growers like Sorn and her sister.
Sorn is among 100 families in the area growing rice using an array of special methods called the System of Rice Intensification, or SRI. SRI represents an accessible form of innovation for small-scale farmers like Sorn: it boosts yields through different ways of plowing fields and improving soil fertility, and of planting and transplanting rice. SRI helps the plants grow stronger and more resistant to pests and diseases. It doesn't require special seed varieties. And because the plants are healthier, the farmers need less fertilizer and pesticides, which saves them money and preserves the environment.
One of SRI’s techniques involves transplanting single seedlings farther apart, instead of transplanting them in bunches. The distance helps seedlings grow stronger roots. SRI farmers plant their seedlings in rows, so they can weed around the plants more easily. A mechanical weeder helps them speed up the process.
In Sorn’s village of Prey Pa’e, RACHANA found a metalworker named Ben Pen who was willing to work with the local farmers to develop the weeders. With RACHANA’s help, in 2009 he began to adapt designs from India and other countries; he optimized them based on feedback from women farmers. Sorn and about 20 others tested five prototypes. With Pen, they developed one- and two-wheel weeders, which farmers use for different soil and weed conditions. The weeders weigh between 4 and 12 pounds. Each of them has a long handle with which the farmers push narrow wheels with steel spikes, churning the earth and tearing up the weeds.
Most of the farmers responsible for testing the weeders were women. Though men help prepare the soil and assist with the harvest, women do most of the work in the fields. Pen and RACHANA wanted to make sure that the weeder designs are suitable for them. “These weeders are helping women avoid back pain, and neck pain,” Pen says. “They can stand up, and it’s a lot faster.”
Sorn moves down the rows between the rice plants pushing the weeder in front of her like a lawn mower. The tool splashes through a thin layer of water, cutting up clumps of grass and mud.
“There’s quite a difference when you use the weeding tools,” Sorn says. “If you weed by hand you only get the top of the weed, you don’t get the root, and it grows again. When you use the weeding tool, it destroys the root and churns the weed into the soil—it’s better for the soil.”
Sorn farms a little less than two acres. Having the weeder helps Sorn and her sister get their weeding done faster. She says saving this time and labor is particularly important for her now: her husband passed away and her six children are all grown and have left the village to work and study. She’s 55, alone, and needs the help.
RACHANA’s research showed that by combining weeders with SRI, farmers could increase their production to average 5.6 tons per hectare, up from an average of 2.2 tons using traditional techniques. (A hectare is about 2.45 acres.) The organization ordered 900 of the three most popular weeders from Pen; it is selling them to farmers across the country. The tools cost about $20—a significant investment, prompting groups of two or three neighbors to buy the tools together and share them.
The investment is worth the time saved: the women in Prey Pa’e say it takes three people two weeks to weed a hectare, and by the time they finish, the weeds are already growing again. “With the weeder, three people can finish in one morning,” says Pen Rat, who was part of the prototype testing team.
Sorn says she helped test the one-wheel weeder, and suggested that Pen lower the angle of the handle, so women would be pushing at waist level. “I thought women would have more strength to push and pull,” she says.
Simple forms of innovation, like these mechanical weeders, encourage farmers to come together, share their ideas, and play a role in developing technological improvements for their farming. This type of endeavor is just a small part of Oxfam’s work to transform agriculture for the poorest farmers in Cambodia.
Farmers like Sorn Ken confirm this: “Having this weeder is like having another person,” she says.
]]>But in the shadow of conflict and danger, a better future is unfolding for farmers like Abdallah.
Two Sudanese partners of Oxfam – the Sudan Development Association (SDA) and the Voluntary Network for Rural Helping and Development (VNRHD)– have joined forces to grow a network of small, community-based organizations in farming villages near El Fasher. Network members can qualify for plows, horse and donkey carts, livestock, workshops, and small business loans, as well as new varieties of seed for watermelon, sorghum, cucumbers, and okra. And the organizations are helping farmers build carefully engineered reservoirs to capture the scarce rainwater their crops depend on. The result: great strides in the efficiency and productivity of farms, and the emergence of safer small businesses to supplement rural incomes.
“Before we had high-quality seeds, I grew one and a half sacks of sorghum,” says farmer Gameila Ismail, a member of the network. “Now I’m able to produce four.”
Ibrahim Isa Ibrahim’s gains have been even more impressive. He won a horse in the network lottery, which allows him to cultivate more land than before. The seeds he’s planting are three times as productive as the old varieties, and the network-funded reservoir in his village helps ensure good crops. Now, he says, his harvest is five times what it was.
In the midst of a meeting at the network headquarters, farmer Hawa’a Ismail receives a welcome phone call: her goat has given birth to its first kid. Ismail lives in a village 80 kilometers from El Fasher. In 2009, she received a loan of around $200 from the network to develop a small enterprise. “I bought a sack of sugar and a big can of oil,” she says. “That was the beginning.” After she sold them for a profit, she bought two sacks of sugar and a can and a half of oil. The business progressed, and soon she was able to replace her house of straw with one of mud brick, increase her savings fivefold – and buy a goat kid.
But the women agree that participating in the network has brought them more than financial gains. Their voices and experience are valued in the organization, and their financial successes have helped build their confidence.
“Previously, I didn’t have the courage to speak in front of people,” says Abdallah. “I felt I didn’t have much to say. Now I have experience and something to tell. People can benefit from that. Now, I can speak loudly; not only that, but people are listening to me.”
“It used to be that in meetings, I only listened - particularly when men talked,” says Gameila Ismail. Now, she says, “I fight for women’s rights.”
This, she explains, is the result of education.
Every month in the camps near El Fasher town, a team of health workers—elected by their community and trained by Oxfam—fans out to bring messages about health and hygiene to thousands of residents. The workers go house to house, teaching newcomers about disease vectors, hand washing, and the use of latrines, and they organize community-wide campaigns to clean everything from streets to latrines to household water cans.
You might think people would resent unsolicited advice about their personal habits, but the health workers generally get a warm welcome. Women, who have the primary responsibility for the care of children and homes, are happy to receive this information, say the workers. And for the most part they take the advice.
"If they don’t want to accept what we are saying, we don't go harsh on them," says health worker Halima Nasur "We just communicate the information peacefully." But the cost of not heeding hygiene messages could be outbreaks of deadly disease, so the health workers sometimes ask community leaders to intervene. "They nicely teach a woman the importance of our work to her family. Then she listens."
For the health workers, their job is a labor of love. "I believe that all the people in the camp are my sisters and brothers," says Nasur. "We are never going to let our people down."
When it came to guarding the health of her family and community, Gado needed no coaxing. "From the public health women, I learned to cover food to keep away flies because they transmit diseases. I also learned about keeping things clean—our jerry cans, kitchen utensils, latrines, and my children's hands," she says. "Previously, my children didn’t wash their hands before they ate. They were often weak and not healthy. Now, they wash their hands before eating. They don't suffer from diarrhea, and if they happen to get sick, it isn't something serious."
Once learned, it is hard to forget the life-and-death importance of good hygiene practices, and according to Gado, the work of Oxfam and the community health workers is likely to have a lasting impact. "I learned these values, and I'm going to apply them throughout my life," she says. "I would like to thank all of the people who have supported us," says Gado, "and I wish them good health."
]]>“The biggest problem is the land,” said Clairin Webert, a sea of white tents billowing behind him. “Some people wake up at night crying because they don’t know what they’re going to do, where they’ll go.”
As more than a million people remain homeless a year after the seven magnitude earthquake ravaged the capital and surrounding communities, access to land on which families can build new homes and start new lives—or even continue to camp in makeshift shelters—has become one of the most difficult challenges they face.
The Haitian government has been slow to develop a resettlement plan and to allocate land for survivors, many of whom were renters and now have nothing to return to. In early December, one of the results of that inaction was the knot of tents in Gressier, staked flank to flank, where about 375 people clung to the hope that help would come before they were kicked out of here, too.The man who owns the land allowed the families to set up camp for a few months, but wanted it back and the case was before a judge in a local court.
“If there was a word stronger than discouraged, that would be the word to describe how I feel,” said Webert. He was sitting in the shade under a tarp covering the shell of a ruined building. In the distance, the water—Caribbean blue—sparkled through the trees. But there was little sparkle here as Webert and fellow camp resident Frederic Bonny talked about all this band of families from Mariani has been through.
They numbered just over 600 in the beginning when they sought shelter on the grounds of New Hope Ministry back in January. But when that landowner wanted the space back, they moved to a place called Morne Bateau, near a beach where the winds were dangerously strong. So in early September, the families moved again—to this slice of land in the neighborhood of Merger. With each move their ranks thinned: some families returned to their ruined homes; others went to live with relatives and friends.
But for people like Yolande Chery, options were few. In early December, she had no way of making a living—and many mouths to feed, including the four-month-old baby she was nursing outside a tent. Chery lost the mattress repair business that supported her and her other children when the quake hit and she has been relying on the goodwill of her neighbors in nearby tents to share their food with her. Some days, she didn't eat at all.
And Chery’s worries were about to get worse: Her four other children she had sent to live with relatives after the quake were coming back to live with her. How would she support them?
“Give us land to live on when we set up our shelters,” said Chery. “And give us a grant so we can start a trade or business to survive.”
As the families have moved from site to site, Oxfam has been helping to provide them with clean water and sanitation services, essential especially now that cholera, a deadly waterborne disease, has broken out across the country. At the Merger camp, Oxfam constructed a bank of emergency latrines at the back of the site that can be emptied weekly. Instead of dirt pits, they’re built around drums designed to prevent wastes from seeping into the seawater that runs close to the surface of the ground.
And with oversight from Charles Nesly, an Oxfam public health promotion supervisor, cholera prevention activities were in full swing at the camp. A cleaning committee made up of camp residents ensured that a small blue tank outside the latrines stayed full of water so people could wash their hands regularly. And each day, the latrines were sprayed with a water-chlorine solution to keep them clean.
At the other end of the camp, a yellow bladder, like a big pillow, provided water to the taps from which people came to fill their jugs and lug them back to their tents. The bladder got filled each day by a water delivery truck.
If you’re counting latrines, shower stalls, and water, the families in this camp are rich, said Frederic Bonny, a camp leader and teacher who has managed to find a part-time teaching job. But so much else—food, good educational opportunities, land to settle on—they don’t have, he said.
“As far as finding land, it’s not a problem, but every land we find, the owners want money,” said Bonny. And if an owner learns a non-profit group is supporting families in pursuit of that land, they’ll jack up the price.
If there was a government—a serious government—since the 12th of January to this day people wouldn’t be under tents,” added Webert. “The only way we are surviving is because of help from NGOs.”
]]>Most of the 118 families here didn’t have latrines and when the January 12 quake turned many of their houses into heaps of rubble--upending their lives--stomach illnesses and cases of diarrhea began to climb. Making matters worse, the pump that had filled a cistern with water on which families relied had broken.
In camps for earthquake survivors, people had easy access to clean water and sanitation services thanks to the effort of aid groups. Should the people of Tapion abandon their community and go to a camp, too?
It might have been tempting—if Oxfam hadn’t launched an initiative to provide similar assistance to Tapion, allowing families to stay where they were while making a long-term improvement in the quality of their lives. What changed? Household sanitation, starting with an unforgettable lesson about feces and ending up with latrines—100 of them, dug by willing families and now ready for completion by Oxfam, which is building the small hut that surrounds each pit.
A key part of Oxfam’s water and sanitation program is hygiene education. But before it could carry that out effectively in Tapion, said Frantz Jean Lys, a public health promotion supervisor, it realized residents needed a decent place to go to the bathroom—and that would require changing some traditional practices. Most people were relieving themselves out in the open.
So, to convey just how unsanitary that solution was, public health workers put on a presentation that showed how flies can travel from excrement to food, contaminating the food with germs.
As that reality sank in, Oxfam invited families to join in a campaign to build household latrines across their community. Andrena Attis jumped at the chance.
A young mother with a husband and two children, Attis has been living in a tent with 10 people since the quake destroyed her home. All that’s left is the concrete slab on which the long—and leaky—tent is now pitched.
But on a rise surrounded by plantain trees stands the family’s shiny new latrine, its corrugated metal walls glinting in the sun—irresistible to her children.
“All day they’re opening the door and going inside,” said Attis, adding that the new latrine gives her a sense of pride, too.
The family had longed for the convenience—and had used a neighbor’s latrine off and on—but couldn’t afford one of its own. Until now.
And it required a serious investment. To get the cash to hire the man to dig the pit at 100 gourdes per foot, Attis’s family had to sell a goat and some chickens. But with Oxfam providing the materials for the shed that surrounds the latrine, now was the time to make the commitment, said Attis.
“It’s better for us now,” she said. “It’s a lot safer.” And with cholera, a deadly waterborne disease, sweeping across the country, the latrine is more welcome than ever.
“Now there’s a cholera epidemic, so even if we had no latrine, we would have continued using the neighbor’s,” said Yvon Attis, Andrena’s brother.
Both of them have been very worried about the disease, and have taken to heart the lessons on how to prevent it. Hand washing is key—before eating and after going to the bathroom. Yvon Attis said he’s going to stick with those simple steps religiously.
And for water? The cistern is a short walk from their house—just a few minutes—and Oxfam has been filling it regularly with a water truck. Soon the organization will have the pump fixed, too.
Clean water and sanitation have made it easier for Attis and her family to stay on the land they own and farm. But there’s more work to do to return to the life they once had. The family needs a house.
“I hope to rebuild,” said Attis, recalling how frightened her children were when Hurricane Tomas howled across Haiti recently, whipping at their tent. “But I don’t know when.”
]]>Over time, that will mean one third of the dangerous fuel-gathering trips to the countryside, one third the loss of trees, one third the smoke inhaled by Dawelbiat and her young ones, one third the air emissions. And now that she is buying her fuel in the marketplace, she’s spending a third of what she used to and has more money to feed and clothe and educate her children.
Her stove—known as the Berkeley-Darfur Stove—is the brainchild of the Darfur Stoves Project (DSP), a US-based Oxfam partner organization that draws on the work of engineers at the Lawrence-Berkeley National Laboratory in California. DSP worked with women in Darfur to develop a stove suited to their needs that would use less than half the fuel of a traditional three-stone fireplace and significantly less than other stove models that are available locally. The result is a portable 12-sided metal stove - around 12” in every dimension - that is as advanced in its design as it is simple in its construction. And whose frugal output is a match for the scarce resources of the Darfur camps.
On a day in December, while her daughter and a friend play on a mat behind her and a neighbor holds her ten-month-old baby, Dawelbiat sits down on a low stool next to her stove and begins to cook her family’s mid-morning meal. The kitchen is a low mud-brick building, shadowy but brightly lit where the sun slips in through the doorway.
She places a pot of water on the stove, adds a few pieces of wood to the firebox, and sets the fire going with a match. When the water boils, she sprinkles ground millet into the pot and stirs it with a long, carved wooden stick until she’s created a thick porridge—known as asida—which she sets aside in a bowl. The next course is mullah, a soup made of onions fried in oil with dried meat, crushed tomato, okra, and spices. And finally, tea. In the space of an hour, Dawelbiat and her fistful of kindling have produced a meal for six.
At the compound of Oxfam partner SAG (Sustainable Action Group) in nearby El Fasher, the usual sounds of a Darfur town—the roar of vehicles, the clatter of grain mills, and the bleats and brays of animals—is replaced with the banging of metal on metal. Here in a building sided and thatched with sorghum stalks, eight men from the Al Salaam camp work at tables assembling Berkeley-Darfur stoves. They smile at visitors and get back to work, bending and hammering metal into its designated size and shape. To the list of benefits of the stoves can be added one more: employing survivors of the conflict, who—uprooted from their homes and farms—struggle to find any work at all.
So far, SAG and the workers from the camps have produced and distributed around 9,000 stoves. With enough funds, they’ll create 15,000 stoves in 2011. Some will go to the camps, others to rural areas hard up against the deadly combination of deforestation and armed conflict.
Dawelbiat is shy with strangers, but her praise for the stove is effusive all the same. “The stove is good because it’s efficient and saves fuel and cooks faster. It’s better at keeping the kitchen clean, and there is less smoke. You can easily cook with it and easily move it around. Even a small portion of fuel can make your food.”
“More people should have these stoves,” she concludes.
It is a point that no one argues.
]]>This is Carrefour Feuilles, an area of Port-au-Prince hit hard by the earthquake that destroyed so much of the Haitian capital—and its commerce—almost one year ago. St. Juste’s house-- also her place of business--once stood here, too. Now it’s in the ravine, one of about 105,000 houses that collapsed across the city. But the land is still here—land that she owns, a testament to the hard work St. Juste invested in building her packaged-goods-and-drinks business into an enterprise profitable enough to allow her to buy this plot.
Now, on this chunk of hard-won security, sits her hope for the future: a trucking container provided by Oxfam and retrofitted to serve as a small shop so she can get started again.
“It really put joy in my heart,” said St. Juste, 34, standing in the entry of her new shop, its walls painted with a fresh coat of pink—a color she loves. “If it wasn’t for that container I don’t know when I’d be back on my feet. I’m on my way. I know I’m going to be able to make it back.”
It’s that kind of confidence that is critical to Haiti’s recovery, and that Oxfam is helping to seed with a series of strategic small-business grants offered to people in Carrefour Feuilles.
The program, which includes micro-credit loans for some people as well as training in business management, is benefitting 44 business owners, five of whom are receiving containers like St. Juste’s. One of the criteria for participation is that merchants offer products locals said they needed in their neighborhood, including food and hardware store goods.
At St. Juste’s shop, called a boutik in Kreole, a white cooler brims with juice drinks and soda. Sporadic electricity is the bane of small-business owners in this neighborhood, adding to the challenges many face in trying to recover their livelihoods and rebuild their clientele.
But St. Juste seems unfazed by that hardship—it’s nothing new. She’s determined to keep plugging away with her sales, and finding ways to stock what her clients want. Right now, that’s energy drinks and colas.
“When I find the money, I’ll get them,” she says, that spark of confidence flashing again.
Over on Rue Cadet Jeremie, at Ger’s Barbershop, fans whir as a steady stream of customers take a seat in one of the four chairs for a cut or a shave. Mirrors line three of the walls, and the fourth is open to the street where Gerson Almeda, the owner, sits watch over a friend’s curb-side kiosk.
A talkative, energetic man with a “Pray for Haiti” bracelet riding on his arm, Gerson says he used the grant Oxfam gave him to help pay rent to keep his shop open. It survived the quake nearly intact—only two mirrors broke--but business was slow in the months that followed.
It’s picking up a bit now, he says. And that’s important because Almeda’s shop is keeping five other people employed—essential in a country where an estimated 80 percent of people do not have formal work and more than 72 percent are living on less than $2 a day. An assessment Oxfam did in June showed a worrisome drop in incomes among households in the most vulnerable neighborhoods of the capital.
“It’s not a well-managed country,” says Almeda. “The government should be doing more. They’re very irresponsible.”
Across Port-au-Prince, people are hungry for work, and Oxfam is continuing to employ some of them for short-term projects that have long-term benefits for their communities. In Sicot Proolongee, a neighborhood through which a steep path of wide steps climbs almost to the sky, about 440 people are working to remove the rubble and make the way passable again. Together with the World Food Program, Oxfam has hired the laborers—men and women—for 200 gourdes a day, or about $5, the going minimum wage. Team leaders earn 400 gourdes a day and supervisors get 600 gourdes.
Two lines of workers, dressed in dark blue T-shirts stamped with the slogan “We’re working together for our community,” snake up the hill and out of sight along a 400-meter stretch. They’re the bag brigade, passing from hand to hand rubble from above, scooped three shovelfuls at a time into sacks. Dumped into a heap at the bottom, the rubble gets hauled off by a truck.
“It was covered,” says Francois Rolande, 23, one of the workers, glancing behind her at the progress made. “The rubble was really high.” Now, the steps, which she used to use all the time, are emerging. And the job is putting some money in her pocket so she can help her family. She has had no other work but this, a reality others up and down the line repeat.
Relaunching a business after a catastrophe is never easy—even if you have the tools, the skill, and the will. And displacement compounds the challenge.
That’s where Joseph Dessources, 60, finds himself today: In a tent with his three children and wife in a resettlement camp called Corrail on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. A tailor who long supported his family with the uniforms and outfits he has sewn for others, Dessources had two employees and three sewing machines thumping away in the capital before the quake hit. All that he has left from that enterprise is one old sewing machine tucked into the corner of his tent.
Oxfam has provided Dessources with a new machine and some business training. But here on this windswept plain among rows and rows of tents, business is slow.
“A few people had uniforms commissioned, but they haven’t come to pick them because they don’t have money,” said Dessources. “There are no jobs in the camps and that’s why there is no money for people to pay.” Not that he is charging much. For a simple uniform of a shirt and shorts, he’ll ask 200 gourdes—or about $5.
“I can’t really charge the same price I was in Port-au-Prince because we’re all in a difficult situation here.” Dessources in particular: He’s disabled. A few days after the quake he lost much of the mobility in his right hand and foot due to hypertension.
“It’s not like the government will help us,” Dessources adds. “When will I really be able to make a living at this?”
Oxfam is keenly aware of the hurdles professionals like Dessources face, and is looking at next steps. One solution could be to provide tailors with extra cloth so they could find markets beyond the camp.
“That’s why we did a study on what the demands are outside the camp,” says Junior Fortune Julien, a livelihoods program assistant for Oxfam. In addition, Oxfam is exploring the idea of developing a communal work space at Corrail so that tailors here can form a union that would allow them to take on large contracts.
For Charitable Pierre, 45, the key to some of these challenges is patience, and almost constant hard work. She runs a small restaurant in Carrefour Feuilles, a business she had built up over the course of 30 years. She lost it all in the quake. But with Oxfam’s help—a grant to restock her shelves with food and a fuel-efficient stove that saves her money—Pierre’s business is coming back strong.
On this mid-afternoon, it’s humming. Tall pots of food bubble on the stove as a steady stream of customers stop by for plates heaped with rice and meat.
“You can’t be in a hurry,” says Pierre. “It’s about working hard. I didn’t have all this,” she adds, eyeing the full shelves and the two tiny tables in her makeshift restaurant—and summing up the hope for all of Haiti. “But look at it now. And maybe in the future I’ll have even more.”
]]>Oshar is a mother of four who fled the war-torn town of Tawila in 2003 to the safety of this camp. But here in Abu Shouk, there is never enough. Camp residents, who are hard-pressed to find any employment, struggle to provide their families with basics like medical care, a balanced diet, and education for children. She sometimes used to find work as a casual laborer in the nearby town of El Fasher, but the pay was short, the hours were long, and the promise for the future was more of the same.
That was then; this is now. Oshar’s little shop is earning her three to four times what she made as a laborer. Her success is partly thanks to a grant from the Darfur Recovery and Reconstruction Agency (DRA), an Oxfam partner in Darfur. In May, DRA provided her with 300 Sudanese pounds (around $120) to buy her first items for sale. But they offered more than money.
When people are uprooted from their homes, explains Oxfam livelihoods specialist Adam Bushara, to make a decent living they may need to acquire an entirely new kind of knowledge. “Building skills is what we are most interested in.”
And DRA couldn’t agree more. Before issuing grants to start new businesses, the agency provides training in business management.
“We were taught how to purchase and sell—how to make a profit and when you gain,” says Oshar, who clearly absorbed key lessons. Asked how she decides what to sell in her shop, she answers confidently, “it depends on market demand. I did an analysis and found that the money I could make from millet was more than I could make from firewood.”
With her new skills and income, Oshar’s life as a parent has been transformed. When she worked as a laborer, she says, “It was hard to take care of my children during the day.” Now, she cares for her younger two while she works in the shop and is able to provide a mid-morning meal to her school-aged children.
“Now I am able to buy vegetables and meat for my family—if not every day, then every other day. Before, I wasn’t able to pay school fees; now I can. I used to be worried about money and about my family,” says Oshar. “Now I’m much better. I don’t have this feeling any longer.”
]]>Their mission? To build some of the 700 latrines Oxfam is helping to fund in the Petite Riviere area of the Artibonite province, where the deadly waterborne disease first broke out in October. It has now reached every province in the country, aided in its rapid spread by Haiti’s poor infrastructure: 50 percent of Haitians don’t have access to clean water, and more than 80 percent don’t have latrines.
For some of the families in this rice-growing region, that’s about to change. The latrines are part of a multi-pronged effort, including a public health education campaign, Oxfam has launched to help 125,000 people in this area stop a disease that hadn’t surfaced in Haiti since 1960. By the end of November, cholera had already sent more than 34,000 people to the hospital and killed more than 1,750 across the country.
Oxfam is also tackling the outbreak in Cap Haitien, Haiti’s second largest city, and in Port-au-Prince, the capital. There, intensive efforts to provide clean water, sanitation services, and public health education to people displaced by the January 12 earthquake has prevented any known cases of the disease from cropping up in the camps where Oxfam works.
Along with the household latrines in Petite Riviere and the construction of 50 school latrines, Oxfam is planning to drill 50 boreholes to be fitted with hand pumps and repair three water networks to provide people with greater access to clean water. But as important as those initiatives are, stopping cholera requires education—how to prevent it and how to treat it and to know to seek medical help when diarrhea and vomiting starts.
In coordination with the ministry of health, Oxfam has taken to the airwaves in Petite Riviere, broadcasting information on how to prevent cholera. It has trained government community health workers as well as peer educators on key messages and they are fanning out to spread the word. Equipped with battery-powered bullhorns, Oxfam health promoters are trekking through fields and across canals, sharing vital information with farmers as they work.
“Members of the community are very keen about what is being said,” said Mario Guerrero, the cholera program manager in Petite Riviere. “They have the feeling when they go into the trainings that there’s no way out if you get it.”
But after people have learned something about the disease and its transmission?
“They have the idea you can do something,” said Guerrero.
Doing something is what Erntz Jean and the team of volunteers were all about: With materials provided by Oxfam—wood for walls and a roof, and a slab to cover the pit—they were helping their neighbors build the first latrines many of them have ever had.
“That’s how we do things here,” said Jean, standing near the just-built wooden structure covering the latrine of Lozina Cena. “We help each other.”
The team picked up their tools and wove between the hedges and small houses to their next location: a narrow pit, six feet deep, just beyond the canopy of a giant mango. They got to work sawing two-by-fours, hammering, and preparing the frame for the housing of the latrine.
“Everybody here is very happy about this. Not only me—everyone in the area,” said Jean, who was among those who received materials to build a latrine. A carpenter by trade, he said he never had the money to build one before this.
“As a carpenter, if there was work, I’d be working and I’d have the money to do this. But there’s no activity here—no jobs,” said Jean.
Down the road, Eugene Joseph, a father of five children, had almost completed his new latrine. He spent a part of five days digging the hole—after starting in a different spot in his yard and hitting rock.
“Before, we didn’t use any latrines. We went in the bush or the street,” he said, noting the street—a rough dirt road—was about 40 meters from a canal leading to the Artibonite River from which his family pulls its drinking water.
“We were never sick,” said Joseph.
But the cholera outbreak scared him.
“We thought it would spread around our house,” said Joseph. And so with Oxfam’s help he decided to build the latrine.
“We’re proud of this,” he added.
A few houses away, Charite Estimable, echoed Joseph’s fear. But she wasn’t really worried about herself: She had been treating her water in a sand filter for most of the past year and had received some chlorine tablets from Oxfam to purify it further. It was her children—she has 11—whose health she was fretting over.
“I was afraid for my children in Port-au-Prince,” she said, noting that six of them were now living in the crowded capital.
Estimable’s neighbor, Altagrace Nicolas, also voiced confidence in her ability to keep cholera at bay.
“I’ve always been careful with myself and my children,” she said. “I’ve never been negligent. The reason it spread in some places is because people were not careful.”
To help everyone become more vigilant, Oxfam has been sending out teams for random monitoring of the water families collect and treat with the chlorine tablets the organization has been distributing.
Toting a bucket loaded with a couple of pitchers and a chlorine testing kit, George Van Vulpen and Elie Saint-Cyr, public heath engineers for Oxfam, hit the dirt roads of Akacite and Trankilite, two communities near the Artibonite River. Stopping at one house here, another there, they took a scoop of drinking water, tested it for residual levels of chlorine, and discussed the results with the householders—all with an eye toward encouraging proper use of the tablets. Had they been adding the tablets to the water? When? Were they dropping in the right number of them?
“For sure they’re using them,” said Van Vulpen, packing up the gear after the last sample of the day. “Most of them (the samples) have residual chlorine.”
That was a good sign—and so was the news he picked up along the way.
“In Akacite, they didn’t know of anyone who was sick anymore,” said Van Vulpen.
“We have a feeling that we are doing better than other parts of the country,” said Guerrero, the program manager for Petite Riviere. “Reported cases are going downward—slightly. But downward.”
]]>Dénéus works for Oxfam in the commune of Petit Rivière in the department of Artibonite in Haiti -- an area recently plagued by cholera. She sets out in the morning in a four-by-four truck, seeking out farmers in the fields who may not have heard the radio programs Oxfam has recently broadcast about proper hygiene and sanitation measures to stop the cholera, avoid infection, or the basic steps to help stricken people survive.
Spotting a crew of five men preparing a field to plant potatoes, she asks the driver to stop the truck, and she bounds out the back, moving across the road, down a well-worn path, jumping across an irrigation ditch, to the edge of the field.
It’s best for those accompanying Dénéus to stand behind her when she gets into action: she routinely uses a battery-powered megaphone to greet the farmers, and her words are loud and carry a long way. She asks them if they have already been trained on how to avoid and treat cholera and proper hygiene and sanitation practices. If they seem unsure or say no, she launches into the routine: she explains that cholera is a bacterial disease, can be passed by drinking contaminated water, and can be controlled by washing your hands before putting anything in your mouth. She encourages them to chlorinate water before drinking it, and to take early action to treat people showing symptoms of diarrhea and vomiting with an oral rehydration solution.
Some of the farmers stop, lean on their hoes, and listen, while others keep piling the moist earth into long mounds, in preparation for planting. But even the ones who keep working shout questions as they go: Where can we get soap? What about helping people who are sick? Where do we get the chemicals to treat our drinking water? Dénéus responds to all the questions: She refers people to centers where oral rehydration solution is available in their village, so they can ensure sick relatives can survive. And where to get one of the 35,000 cholera kits Oxfam is distributing, which have all the things they need to keep clean and treat their drinking water.
One topic dominates discussion in each of the 10 or so fields she sees this morning: she urges the farmers, “avoid going to the toilet right on the ground!” This is a major, longstanding problem in rural Haiti since well before the January 12th earthquake hit Port-au-Prince nearly a year ago: with no sewage system, running water, or proper latrines, many rural households must answer nature’s call in the open. Not all households have a latrine, so the farmers ask for advice: it’s simple, Dénéus says, dig a hole and bury the excrement. But Oxfam is also deploying a team of engineers to help farmers with simple materials to build their own latrines as an important step to reducing vulnerabilities to water-borne diseases like cholera. They plan to help install 700 latrines in Petite Rivière.
Dénéus is relentless, she repeats her messages with the same enthusiasm for each group she encounters toiling in the hot December sun, sweat running down the side of her face. “If you don’t think cholera can kill you, go to the hospital, go to the morgue, and see for yourself,” she tells any skeptical farmers.
Passing by a group she spoke with earlier in the morning now taking a lunch break, she stops and poses a question: “Did you wash your hands before eating?” Of course the answer is yes, but when she asks if they used soap, a few look down, but most of them make no excuses: soap is expensive and they are not accustomed to bringing it to the fields with them. Another form of behavior for Dénéus to change: With Oxfam distributing free soap, expense is not an issue in the short term, and eventually she hopes that farmers will improve their hygiene practices in the fields as well as at home.
After a productive morning tour of the fields, Dénéus stops by a few oral rehydration centers in the community of Marqès. These are simple tables stocked with clean water, mixing bowls and cups, and small packets of oral rehydration salts. These tables are staffed by trained volunteers who can teach people how to mix the life-saving solution, and ensure that anyone with a sick family member has access to this essential therapy. Cholera can kill in just a few hours by completely dehydrating a victim, so oral rehydration is essential. Dénéus checks the supplies, and coaches the volunteers on preparing solutions, how to answer frequently asked questions, and asks if there has been any activity at the centers as part of the monitoring Oxfam is doing in the community.
Dénéus has a law degree and is working for Oxfam because she says the right to life is one of the most basic. “I came here to save lives; that’s what Oxfam is doing here,” she says as she leaves the fields after a busy morning.”I’ve only been working here a month, but I’ve seen Oxfam doing good work, and it is saving lives. The rate of mortality is reduced, and the rate of people getting sick is also lower thanks to Oxfam.”
The work of Dénéus and other public health promoters is reaching out to 125,000 people in the region, using the radio and in-person visits to push key messages about good hygiene and sanitation habits. Mario Guerrerro, Oxfam’s program manager in Petite Rivière, says this effort is proving essential. “The training for people to change their habits is making the difference,” he says in his office, looking over the declining mortality figures in a report from the health ministry. “Once people understand, they do their best to treat their water.”
Toward the end of Dénéus’s rounds this one morning, she encounters nearly 40 farmers in a relatively small area she can hit in one stop. She moves through her presentation, answers a few questions, and concludes her visit with a phrase, a promise, and a wish: “Zero cholera!” she shouts, her final words to the farmers.
]]>Celia Candiotti works as a security guard at the main municipal office of Huamanga, the capital of Ayacucho province in Peru. She’s tall and thin, and has a narrow face and severe eyes. She’s pleasant, but professional, as you would expect from a uniformed officer who commands respect.
Several years ago she was at work when she saw a 12-foot-high wall of water, mud, boulders, and cars flooding down one of the main streets in the city.
Cadiotti ran straight into the maelstrom to rescue people.
“You can’t fight your destiny,” Candiotti says, citing her training as a nurse and a firefighter. “I didn’t even think, I just responded -- I waded right in.” She rescued several injured people before she found a young girl, perhaps seven years old, trapped in a car. “She said to me, ‘I’m gonna die.’ I said ‘no’. But the water was coming in the window fast.”
That day the landslide killed about a dozen people, but thanks to Candiotti, that one young girl survived. The Ministry of Women gave Candiotti an award for heroism.
Candiotti noticed something then: people lined the street, horrified by the disaster, but did not help. She remembered this later when she went to a training session for the staff at the municipal office. The topic was how to understand and reduce racism and discrimination at their work, so they could ensure equal access to the services citizens need from the local government.
When it came to the pervasive racism in Ayacucho, Candiotti was much like the bystanders she saw on the street that day: concerned, but not sure what to do.
The training session was organized by APRODEH, a human rights group Oxfam has been funding to work on ways to reduce racism and discrimination in Peru. The organization led efforts to help local governments pass new laws – ordinances – that require equal access to services, equal treatment by officials, for everyone, whatever their gender or ethnicity, whatever language they speak, however they dress, and whatever their age or appearance.
Addressing the racism and discrimination directed toward indigenous people, women, and handicapped people is an important component of Oxfam’s work to reduce barriers that keep people in poverty. And training for municipal workers, who play an essential role in helping citizens gain access to crucial services from local government, is one way APRODEH and Oxfam are working to changing the way people think about each other—and themselves--in Ayacucho.
For Candiotti, a woman who grew up on the coast in a family of Italian immigrants, understanding and confronting the racism and discrimination she could see in Ayacucho since she moved here eight years ago is a tremendous blessing. She says APRODEH’s training helped her and others understand that all people have basic rights. “People from the highlands are not any less than me, and we all have to learn to relate to each other. I could see the changes in the staff here,” she says, standing in her uniform near the front of the municipal hall. “We left the training calm and happy, a joy has taken over us.”
Now, Candiotti says the staff of the municipality behaves completely differently. Whereas before the indigenous staff would be reluctant to even speak Quechua, the local indigenous language, they are now happy to help indigenous people who come to the office no matter what language they can speak. “When people come and inquire in Quechua,” she says, “we all speak Quechua now, our attitude has really changed. We used to make fun of an elderly señora dressed in traditional clothes, but not anymore.”
When she’s at work, Candiotti wears a uniform slightly too large for her slim, athletic frame, with a cap pulled low over her forehead. She’s got a serious look about her, but when she describes the changes in the staff attitudes her eyes get a little wet.
Near the front entrance, she meets with some indigenous, Quechua speaking women under an arch leading in to the massive, Spanish colonial courtyard. Her warmth comes through as she answers questions, gives direction, and laughs at a joke.
Candiotti acknowledges that perhaps some destinies can change: “There’s always been discrimination,” she says near her post at the front entrance. “But little by little, this is changing.”
]]>There’s a poster in the office of APRODEH in Ayacucho that depicts a group of highland indigenous people riding on a bus. Each passenger is regarding the others with suspicion: “I don’t like the look of that one,” one is thinking. Another thought bubble over the head of a fellow passenger says, “that cholo might rob me,” using a derogatory term for an indigenous person.
It’s a realistic scene, says Wilfredo Ardito, a 45-year-old attorney who APRODEH’s work on racism and discrimination in Ayacucho. He says Peru is an extremely ethnically diverse country, but years of racist attitudes towards the native people have resulted in the indigenous people themselves rejecting their own identity, refusing to speak their own languages, and turning their backs on their own culture. “They even use derogatory words against people like themselves,” Ardito says. “People lack self esteem, they respect white people more than themselves.” This is one of the key aspects of APRODEH’s training: helping people accept who they are, and to be proud of themselves. “Part of the process of eliminating racism is accepting your own face,” Ardito says.
APRODEH teaches staff at municipal government about discrimination and racism as a means to raise awareness and encouraging local communities to pass local ordinances to promote equality as part of a comprehensive effort to fight poverty in Ayacucho “We know it is more effective to have a local law,” Ardito says. “Most people don’t know about the national laws, not the police, not the judges.” One strategy that has proven effective is to work directly with elected regidoros, sort of like county commissioners, who represent specific constituencies in municipal affairs.
Socorro Arce, 45, is a regidora in Huamanga who helped organize a training session for all the female elected politicians in the department of Ayacucho – about 113 of them. This led to a network that is helping to promote women leaders, a space where Arce says “we can exchange ideas, and talk about human rights and gender, and we support new ideas like the ordinances, so we can reduce discrimination against people who speak Quechua, have a different religion, or women who are pregnant.”
Arce started fighting against injustice while in a religious high school, which she says was run poorly and discriminated against the darker skinned, poorer girls. “That’s why I became a leader -- the girls were really submissive, and I started to change that mentality,” she says. Arce was expelled twice, once for leading a strike against the school by students objecting to corporal punishment. “They would make us stand facing a wall with our hands on our heads for hours, it was like torture. I told them, ‘If you keep punishing us like this, we won’t go to class’,” she says she announced one day. “I was about 14 or 15 then.”
When APRODEH was looking for an ally to promote local ordinances, program officer Arturo Lopez decided to approach Arce because “she’s really accessible, I called her and she said ‘come on over,’ and she helped negotiate with the other women leaders.” He called the right person, it seems. Starting in her high school days, Arce says struggling against injustice was always high on her agenda. “In all the positions I have held as a leader, I have always spoken out against discrimination.”
Lopez and Arce are an unlikely pair. He is soft spoken, she is an aggressive talker, an avid networker. “I really like Arturo,” Arce says over a glass of fruit juice overlooking the central plaza in Huamanga. “He’s really calm. I’m more like an earthquake.”
Together they convened the women leaders, held a training session, and these women then went out and helped their communities pass four new ordinances in Ayacucho APRODEH says are fighting back against racism and discrimination at the local level.
]]>Near the city of Huamanga is a smaller municipality called Jesus Nazareno. After the city of Huamanga passed a new ordinance to address racism and discrimination, Jesus Nazareno took steps to do the same in 2008.
Jesus Nazareno is a community founded by people fleeing the violence of the 1980s guerilla war. This conflict originated in the highlands of Ayacucho, and indigenous people there suffered terribly at the hands of both the Shining Path rebels and the Peruvian military. Many were survivors of horrible human rights violations. The founders of Jesus Nazareno had the protection of human rights firmly in the foundation of their new community.
“We took this initiative to create a non-discrimination ordinance to counter the prejudice against campesinos, rural people, even disabled people,” says Nancy Contreras, who works for the Jesus Nazareno government. She says the central message the municipality wants to send with the ordinance is that everyone is equal in Jesus Nazareno. “We are all the same here, poor or not poor, disabled or not.” Contreras says Jesus Nazareno wanted to take measures that would help people gain equal access to those things local government does that can help people climb out of poverty: education, health care, and assistance for disabled people and the elderly.
At a meeting of staff, regidoras and regidoros, and volunteers at the municipal office, the scope of the ordinance starts to become clear:
On the other side of the city of Huamanga, San Juan Bautista developed an anti-discrimination ordinance later the same year. APRODEH helped train staff at the city hall, and aired radio spots to teach citizens about the new ordinance. Since then, one regidora named Magaly Bautista, 28, says she has seen significant differences in the ways people relate to each other in the town since she took up her elected post four years ago. “They’ve changed the way they relate to people,” she says. “I’ve seen changes in people’s conduct; it’s very fulfilling to be a part of it.”
Bautista says the new ordinance has created some positive things for her personally. Coming in to office as a 24-year-old, and a representative from the opposition political party, she says, “I felt discriminated against because I am young…all the people in power were over 40, and they always put me last.”
Now, she says “I have definitely seen changes since the ordinance passed two years ago…young people have gone from being passive to taking up a dynamic role in the government. They participate more in events, and the majority of public officials are women.
“I feel part of the team, and people listen to my opinions.”
]]>To Wilfredo Ardito, the links between poverty and racism in Peru are obvious.
“The differences between life in the highlands, and in the jungles, and life in Lima are extreme,” he says in APRODEH’s office in Ayacucho. “Life expectancy in Lima is 80, and in the highlands it is 50. The campesinos [rural people] are poor, illiterate, malnourished, and people think this can’t change. So when budgets are approved, there is money for a [football] stadium in Lima instead of for reducing maternal mortality in the mountains…there is an attitude that campesinos can suffer, they can exist in this state of poverty, it is all right.”
After 10 years of economic growth in Peru, Ardito says wealth is concentrated in very few hands in the country, and the situation of the poorest people has not changed much.
APRODEH’s strategy is to encourage local leaders to promulgate local ordinances to address problems of racism and discrimination, and then train local municipal staff and officials to implement and enforce the new laws. The training sessions, Ardito says, are particularly effective. “People are skeptical at first, or they think we are going to talk about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement...then they realize it is about their experience, and that they share with others experiences of racism.” This goes for indigenous people, as well as for mestizo (mixed race) and white people who may have been brought up to behave in certain ways towards others who are different. The realization of this can be profound, and life changing.
Oxfam America supports efforts to reduce racism and discrimination against indigenous people and women in Peru because these are the most impoverished people in the country. Helping indigenous people gain more respect for their basic rights will help them gain their fair share of quality education and health care. Eliminating discrimination will also help women gain access to better jobs and other services, and generally improve the situation for the country’s poorest people.
Building respect for indigenous people will also help communities value their own indigenous culture. This is essential because many indigenous groups have developed efficient, sustainable ways of living and working the land in some environmentally sensitive areas. The indigenous ways of using natural resources are being forgotten as people feel they must reject their indigenous identity in order to take advantage of all that modernity and western culture can offer. This is part of the reason why APRODEH and others are encouraging indigenous youth to speak their native languages and be proud of who they are—so they can live a decent life, take advantage of all that their government and society can offer them, without forcing them to assimilate into western culture and forget their past.
These municipal ordinances are helping Peru pull these problems out of the shadows,” Says Santiago Alfaro, Oxfam America’s program officer for indigenous rights in Peru. “Government employees can now see the negative effects of racism and discrimination on the quality of life in the country. APRODEH’s work in Ayacucho is echoing across the country, and there are now more and better legal tools available to help indigenous people remove barriers to public services.”
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