"Here, in the camp, we are sitting with nothing to do," said a woman named Khadeja, her tedium heightened by memories of what she used to do. "In the village we were very active all the time—working on the farms, trading in the markets, herding animals. Here, there are no job opportunities. No income."

Without money, it's difficult for families to get everything they need.

"Everything here is for sale," said a man. "Back home it cost you nothing. You had it on the farm and if you had a surplus you could take it and exchange it for other things in the market."

At some of the camps, people are able to find jobs, but the pay is poor and the work can be exhausting. Kaltoum Ali Asad , a mother of eight children, occasionaly picks up a bit of work in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. It's right next to Abu Shouk camp, which has been her home for the past three years.

"Sometimes I'll walk to El Fasher town and find a job cleaning, sweeping, washing clothes," she says. "I'll get 75 cents for washing a dozen pieces of clothing, which takes all afternoon. There isn't much you can buy for 75 cents. Maybe a bundle of firewood."

In the past, gathering firewood was one of the chores that Asad devoted time to. But she has stopped because it is unsafe to leave the safety of the camp to collect it. Now, she buys her wood from the market and a bundle doesn't last very long—perhaps just enough to cook one meal, but no more.

"Food is another challenge," says Asad. "The children might go for a month without the food we think is valuable for them—fruits, vegetables, meat. Meat is very expensive: $5 for a kilo, and I don't have the money to buy it, and there are no adequate vegetables I can get as a substitute."

For children, who rise at dawn, household chores can consume a good part of the day, especially if one of them is wood gathering. They tell of walking for five hours, in groups of boys and girls up to 10 strong. Collecting grass to hawk in the markets is another task children assume, though a sale can take a long time. Preparing meals and washing are chores that fall to the girls, but both boys and girls fetch water. And if school is open, children attend classes between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m.

When darkness comes, everyone retires.

"We're too scared to go out when it's dark," says one girl. "We go to sleep."

Fourteen-year-old Mahmoud sums it up this way. "I've been here three years with my mother and father, six brothers and three sisters," he says. "We're not happy with the life here. I'd like to be living back in my village—like it used to be."

So, three times a week, and sometimes more, women from the Abu Shouk and Al Salaam camps head out on four-hour treks to scavenge for fuel. If they don't come upon any trees, the women resort to clawing through the hard-packed earth to reach bits of root that they can burn instead.

But hard work is only part of their problem. Looming larger for these women is the constant threat to their safety: By venturing even a short distance outside of the camps they could face harassment, sexual assault, or even death. Since early 2003, conflict has wracked this region, forcing more than 2 million people from their homes. Many of them have sought shelter in camps like Abu Shouk and Al Salaam. But the demands of daily living—the need for wood, for jobs, for food—often require them to leave the safety of those camps.

Now, Oxfam America, together with the Sudanese Agency for Environment and Development Service (SAEDS), has launched a $132,000 program that will help thousands of displaced women stay safer in this volatile place. The agency is providing 4, 200 households with fuel-efficient stoves that, in many cases, will completely remove the need for women to hunt for wood. Two thousand of the stoves are kerosene-fueled; another 2,000 are efficient wood-burning stoves; and 200 of them use gas. The project will benefit about 25,200 people.

Women were excited about getting the stoves, said Sahar Ali, an Oxfam America program officer, who paid a monitoring visit to Abu Shouk in late January.

"Traditionally, the provision of firewood and fuel for cooking has been the responsibility of women," said Ali, in a report she filed after the visit. "There are few other sources of cooking fuel available to them."

But with the introduction of kerosene and gas, they now have other options. And the small round stoves that burn wood efficiently—as opposed to open fires—means women will need to make fewer of the dangerous scavenging trips.

Still, convincing women that gas is a smart way to cook has taken some doing, said Ali. They worried about its hazards.

"This is the first time for them using gas, and most of the houses are made from wood," said Ali. "If it burns, it burns all the camp. They said we prefer kerosene—not the gas."

Thinking green

The hesitancy about gas notwithstanding, the new stoves are bringing another important benefit to the region, too: some relief for the environment.

"North Darfur is mostly desert, and the few trees that provided a nearby source of cooking fuel when the camps were first created more than two years ago are all gone," said Ali in her report.

It's a trend that Ibrahim Suliman, a program coordinator for SAEDS, has watched for the past four decades as it's crept across the region.

"When I was a child, most of Darfur was covered in forest—even North Darfur," said Suliman, a native of Dar el Salaam, a small village about 30 miles south of El Fasher. But in the last 30 years, those trees and grasses have given way to desert. Why?

"Because of overgrazing," said Suliman. "Because there is no planning for animal breeding. And the firewood for cooking. And for houses—people build their houses from wood. And charcoal traders."

But with the introduction of the stoves, some of that degradation can be slowed since less wood will be needed for cooking. Suliman has even convinced his mother to switch to kerosene.

"She's very happy. It's clean," he said.

Planting projects

SAEDS is taking its concern for the environment a step further: It has launched a replanting project in Dar es Salaam and plans to begin a similar effort around the camps.

"Our philosophy is to restock the forest and all these things will be improved," said Suliman. "If we try to stop cutting trees and every year we try to plant many new trees, within four to five years we will be able to restock a big amount of trees. And we'll be able to at least make the environment more attractive than before and people can find grasses for their animals and be able to cultivate again. It might take a long time, but we have to start."

In Dar el Salaam, thanks to SAEDS, about 4,500 new saplings are now growing.

"In five to 10 years, I'm sure it will be green," said Suliman.

Near El Fasher, trees might also grow again. Oxfam's project with SAEDS calls for the planting of 10,000 seedlings around the camps. Families who have recently received the fuel-efficient stoves will be mobilized to do the planting.

Born and raised in Kutum, one of the last small towns on the edge of the hundreds of miles of vast desert that sweeps north toward Libya and Egypt, Mohammed Ibrahim has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the dozens of different tribes and communities scattered across the region. Today he heads the agency's livelihoods program in northern Darfur, and visitors to Oxfam and the many international staff working on the program regularly turn to him for information on intricate local customs and history. Such local knowledge has helped shape Oxfam's work there over the past 20 years.

Oxfam has traditionally worked in partnership with rural communities throughout Darfur, building local capacity and providing technical know-how to help improve water supplies, sanitation, and agriculture in what has always been one of the poorest and most isolated parts of Sudan. When the current conflict escalated in 2003, up to two million people were uprooted from their villages and crowded into towns or settled into camps for displaced people. The emergency needs of the people of Darfur were clear and Oxfam responded by providing water and sanitation to around 400,000 displaced people.

But many hundreds of thousands more remain in their villages, often in highly volatile rural areas where various groups still vie for control. Many have seen their crops burned, their animals stolen, and their villages looted of assets like irrigation pumps, engines and cooking pots. The violence has prevented villagers from trading in local markets or from going out to harvest their fields. The traditional livelihoods with which they previously sustained themselves have been destroyed.

The local knowledge Oxfam has accumulated over the last two decades is essential in helping such communities. As Mohammed Ibrahim points out: "Oxfam has a long and successful history of working with communities in Darfur. In the current conflict, which continues to devastate the lives and livelihoods of millions of people, these villages have lost everything. Together we can help them along the path to recovery, to strengthen their food security and to rebuild their livelihoods."

Many villagers have had virtually everything they owned taken from them. So the Oxfam livelihoods team is first focusing on helping to replace what has been lost. Working initially in villages to the west of North Darfur in the areas of Kebkabiya, Saraf Omra, and Birka Seira, Oxfam is providing around 30,000 people with a wide range of goods and resources.

Grain and vegetable seeds have been distributed and villages will be carefully restocked with donkeys and other animals. Livestock are an important source of milk and meat and can also be sold to buy grain. Donkeys in particular are integral to the livelihoods of rural Darfur, being used for transport water, firewood, and other essentials.

Before the conflict, many villages had communal mills, which provided an income for the village and also reduced household expenditures, since families did not need to take grain to a private mill. Most such mills have now been destroyed, so Oxfam is working to replace them. Community health committees from each village have planned for the income obtained from these new mills to then be plowed back into rehabilitating schools and health centers that have also been destroyed in the conflict.

Mohammed Ibrahim and the rest of the team consult such community-based committees, women's groups, and other vulnerable sectors of Darfur society at every step to discuss the needs and concerns of each village. "These public forums have enabled Oxfam to tailor our projects to meet villagers' precise needs," he says. Such needs include not only food and farming but also protection and security. With the security situation in Darfur showing no sign of improving, it remains an extremely dangerous place, and communities expressed concern that being re-equipped with relatively valuable tools would only increase their vulnerability to looting and attack. So the livelihoods project is working in tandem with Oxfam's protection team to ensure that communities are not exposed to additional risk. The agency is providing only what is most urgently needed, including blankets, cooking utensils and tools such as donkey plows—relatively low-cost items that should not attract the attention of bandits.

Even the animals' gender can affect a village's security. Only female donkeys are distributed: They can haul firewood, food, and water every bit as well as males, but have significantly less market value and so are less likely to be stolen.

After restocking it is essential to ensure that the animals are kept healthy. Selected local villagers are to be trained as "paravets," assistant veterinarians who will be equipped with toolkits and drugs to ensure that animals are vaccinated against disease.

Mohammed Ibrahim and the team are also spearheading a new initiative to conduct research at key regional markets in North Darfur, mapping out the different production and food security patterns in different areas. Prices of animals, cash crops, and sorghum and millet (the staple grains of the region) are being compared, as well as prices of non-food items such as charcoal and firewood, which, in addition to their practical uses, provide a vital source of income for rural communities. The information gathered will be passed on to other NGOs working in the area to help shape other livelihood and food security programs.

The camp is only about nine miles from their village of Abu Hamra, which once was home to about 500 families. But after Janjaweed militia tore through the community burning dwellings and looting, Omar's family fled, as nearly two million other Darfur residents have done since conflict erupted in the region in 2003.

Omar's family was among the lucky ones. They survived the attack, but lost many of their belongings, including about 110 sheep. They arrived at Shangil Tobai with just a donkey, a bed, and a few clothes. There, they have joined nearly 20,000 other people, many of them from surrounding villages, who have squeezed into Shangil Tobai and a neighboring camp, Shadad, seeking safety from the violence that has shattered their communities.

Oxfam is helping about 400,000 displaced people scattered in camps like Shangil Tobai. The agency is supplying them with clean water and sanitation facilities as well as with essential household goods like soap and water containers. At Shangil Tobai, families have received two cooking pots, a cup, a bowl, a bucket, two jerry cans, a sleeping mat, and blankets.

But while people's basic needs are being met and Omar's youngest children are in school, there is little to fill the lives of camp residents at Shangil Tobai. In their two years at the camp, Omar's family has had no opportunity to earn an income, nor have they been able to plant their fields or harvest a crop. At the end of each month, there is rarely enough food left from the rations provided by international aid groups to feed everyone in the family sufficiently. And it has been nearly two years since any of them have eaten meat—a regular part of their diet back at Abu Hamra.

Danger circles the camp. Leaving its security to collect firewood for cooking is necessary—but risky. In recent weeks, raiders on camels attacked a small group on the edge of the camp, killing three people and stealing their animals. People are increasingly worried that such attacks will take place within the camps themselves.

Omar and his family long to go home, but they find it hard to envision any improvement in their situation in the near future. Talks aimed at a political solution that would bring long-term security to the region have progressed only haltingly.

"We miss our homes. We miss our village, our furniture, our animals, and also our privacy," said Omar. But until a political settlement is reached—and safety for civilians is guaranteed—it is simply too dangerous for Omar and his family to leave Shangil Tobai.

What is a recipe? And a cookbook full of them?

In the camps for displaced people that stretch along Chad's border and across conflict-torn Darfur in western Sudan, the concept is hard to explain. In a world of want—where violence has forced more than two million people from their homes—how do you describe an abundance so great that it needs a cookbook loaded with directions to keep it all straight?

That experience helped define just one of the jarring truths about the global distribution of food that Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio explore in their new book, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats. A grand photo essay 288 pages long, the book took the couple on a journey to 24 countries where they got to know 30 families and the intricacies of each family's weekly food consumption. Family recipes accompany every profile.

Brand names and plastic packaging proliferate on some of the pages, testament to the global reach of processed foods and beverages. But on other pages, seeds and raw grains sit in burlap sacks—some more empty than full. A few of those limp sacks belong to the Aboubakars: D'jimia Ishakh Souleymane, who is a widow, and her five children.

The lessons Menzel and D'Aluisio learned from their visits with the Aboubakars are hard to forget, and they hope that readers who consume the stories and pictures in their book won't forget them either.

"What we really wanted to do was help people who didn't have a clue understand what was going on in the rest of the world," said D'Aluisio. "It's important—especially for Americans."

Limits on water and food

For starters, consider the water situation at the Breidjing camp in Chad where the Aboubakars have now lived for more than a year and a half. Their home is a small tent on a sandy plain crowded with countless others just like it. Oxfam has been providing water to thousands of people in the camp. The minimum provision in emergency situations such as this is just shy of 4 gallons per person a day.

"Water is one of the biggest problems," said Menzel. "Thirty thousand people use a lot of water. There's a big difference between having a faucet and carrying water and standing in line for water."

When the Oxfam water truck arrives to fill an empty bladder—a storage device that looks like a giant water bed—the relief that ripples through the blocks of tents is palpable, added D'Aulisio.

"The water is so precious," she said. "I do not turn a faucet on without thinking of all those people."

D'Aulisio's relationship with her garden has also changed since visiting the Aboubakars. Now, she wastes nothing from it, preferring to invest whatever time it takes to can the extra fruits and vegetables it produces.

D'jimia works hard for the little bit of extra food she buys for her family. She earns about $1.35 a day toiling in the fields of nearby villagers—when she can get the work. She uses the money to buy fresh tomatoes or dried okra. But the bulk of her family's diet—three meals a day—consists of the aiysh she stirs up in a big black pot over a fire outside her tent.

Aid groups provide the rations for the roughly 30,000 people in the camp. The allotments are far from lavish, and amount to about 2,100 calories per day per person in the form of a cereal, such as sorghum or millet, and small scoops of pulses and a corn-soy blend. The rations also include small amounts of sugar and salt.

"Most of everyone looks like they're on the minimum amount of calories needed," said Menzel. The rationing system takes into account only the numbers of people in a family, not the size of their appetites or where they fall on the growth charts.

"If you've got a lot of teen-age boys, you've got some difficulty," added D'Aluisio, speaking from her own experience mothering hungry boys.

An Oxfam sojourn

D'Aluisio and Menzel learned about some of the ins and outs of camp management during their three-night sojourn in a tent at the Oxfam compound outside of Breidjing.

"Staying in the compound was great," said D'Aluisio. "We got to hang out with the people who were there."

One of the things that became clear to the couple during their stay at Breidjing is how complex the business is of feeding, sheltering, and providing water and sanitation for tens of thousands of people in a remote, arid place.

"Most people who see it from the outside don't see the difficulty," said D'Aluisio of the logistics in just getting enough food to people. "Sometimes there is a disconnect between the giving and the getting, and that disconnect is infrastructure."

For example, the camp was giving  food out every 15 days instead of every 30 days—which would have been half the work—because it didn't have enough on hand. Food reserves were far away, and there was no guarantee when new supplies would arrive.

The difficulty in stocking Breidjing—or any of the camps in Chad and Darfur where hundreds of thousands of displaced Sudanese have lived in limbo since early 2003—is just the tip of a problem that affects millions of people around the world every day.

"Most hunger in the world is politics based," said D'Aluisio. "There is more than enough food on the planet to feed everybody. It's just warped in terms of who's getting the food and who already has the food. There needs to be more equality than there is."

If she does, there's a chance she will be beaten or raped. If she doesn't, she won't be able to cook breakfast for her children. Even the donkey might starve. Piles of rotting carcasses along one edge of the camp are a constant reminder that many other animals have perished.

Muna isn't her real name, but the difficult choices this mother of five has to make are very real. And so are the dangers she and countless other women face each day in Darfur. In some camps, women, children, and old men make up the majority of the population. Many of the younger men have been killed in attacks.

Not collecting firewood or fodder would have other consequences as well. The first provides cash to help Muna feed her family, and the second keeps her donkey healthy enough to haul water.

Muna and her children are among the hundreds of thousands of families in Darfur who receive monthly food distributions from the World Food Program. The staple grains, a protein-rich mix of corn and soy, and cooking oil are a welcome contribution, but Muna needs a few other ingredients to prepare even the most basic meal. She sells some of the firewood in the local market to earn a few extra dinars to buy onions, tomatoes, dried okra, or chilies to supplement her family's diet. Without the firewood, she would have to sell a portion of the food ration itself in order to buy the additional items. But the amount she receives each month is already barely enough to survive.

The donkey fodder is also very important, since Muna needs her donkey to carry water from the nearby well several times a day. When that well runs dry, as it often does this time of year, she must travel even farther to fetch water. This, too, can be a perilous journey that exposes her to potential violence.

But even the camp that Muna shares with 15,000 other displaced people isn't particularly safe. The straw walls of her small compound provide some privacy, but no real protection. Her "house" is just a shelter made of sticks and plastic sheeting. Sometimes armed men come into the camp at night. They shout and laugh and fire their guns into the air, terrorizing the population.

On the day an Oxfam team arrived for a field visit, the body of a camp resident had been found near the dry riverbed on one side of town. People said he had been beaten to death during the night. The previous week, a group of men from outside the camp visited a house not far from Muna's. They beat the man who lived in the house and raped his wife.

Beyond the perimeter of the camp where Muna lives, there are other groups of people who don't seem afraid at all. Nomadic tribes continue to roam freely in this area. Some of them ride horses and camels, and some of them carry guns. They keep watch over enormous herds of cattle, camels, sheep, and goats. Their animals graze peacefully among the charred ruins of mud-brick huts in the many abandoned villages that dot the landscape.

Of course, not all nomadic tribes are affiliated with the notorious Janjaweed militias that continue to terrorize civilians throughout Darfur. But the contrast is striking: Most of the nomads the Oxfam team met in the Wadi Salih area were confident, reasonably well-fed and secure, while Muna and her neighbors are often sick and hungry, and live in constant fear.

Although people in Muna's camp can see their destroyed village in the distance, they insist that it is too dangerous to return. The armed groups prowling the countryside have effectively imprisoned the displaced Sudanese in the camp.

Retrospective mortality studies have shown that violence has been the leading cause of death in Darfur since the region plunged into conflict in February 2003. It is difficult to calculate exactly how many people have died, but one thing is dreadfully clear: The violence continues.

Every morning, in hundreds of camps and towns across Darfur, mothers like Muna get up to face yet another day filled with threats of robbery, murder, and rape. The fear is debilitating, but the options are few. After agonizing over the alternatives, Muna will go out to collect firewood and fodder. She can't afford not to.

For that reason Oxfam America's duty is clear: We and our project partners must help reform government policies, laws, and social injustices that deny people the right to live a decent life. We do this by providing funding, training, and the moral support people need to make real, substantive and transformative changes. The courageous and visionary people who do this work are setting out to build a movement for social justice—and Oxfam America is one of the few organizations to which they can turn for the help they need.

It's called the West Salvation Road, and it remains unfinished. In Darfur, where nearly two years of violence have left close to one-third of the region's six million people homeless, salvation is just a dream. The rutted dirt roads that link the villages offer little hope that deliverance will come any time soon.

Darfur is not an easy place to navigate no matter what mode of transportation you choose. Heat, banditry, mud and dust, armed attacks, even little boys throwing stones—all of it conspires to make travel across Darfur slow and exhausting.

In parts of the south, up to 40 inches of rain can fall in a year, leaving sections of roads deep in sloppy silt. When it's dry, the fine sand piles in drifts across the roads, swallowing vehicles to their axles. Sometimes, the only way to get where you want to go is to put on your shoes and walk.

It was the shoes that kept catching my eye at Abu Shouk, and other temporary camps where tens of thousands of homeless people now wait out endless days. Mostly, they were slip-on sandals, leaving the wearers' heels to crack in the hot sand and their toes to cake with dust.

Were these the shoes that carried some people across sizzling plains and dried-out riverbeds on their long trek to safety? Many of the people fleeing their torched homes left on foot—and walked for days.

I look down at my boots, glad for the thick leather and lug soles insulating my feet. Could I have trekked the desert in flip-flops?

The only walking I've done is to the market—just once—a half-hour trudge through waves of red sand lapping over one of the few, and very busy, paved roads in El Fasher. Dodging the slower but heavily burdened donkeys, tiny blue and white taxis rattle past in a steady stream. Their interiors are packed with more passengers than it seems could possibly fit. But fit they do, and they don't look unhappy about it. It's better than walking.

Mostly, aid workers in this capital of North Darfur don't walk. They drive, or, more properly, are driven. It's hot, and offices and guesthouses are spread out across a city that some say numbers 200,000 people while others say is twice that. In a place without street names or house numbers, residents must be hard to count.

Driving in Darfur takes skill and patience. It helps to have a sturdy truck since miles of dirt tracks and sharp rocks take their toll on even the toughest vehicles. Breakdowns and mishaps are common. A flat tire and a smashed rear window—courtesy of a little boy tossing a stone—punctuate the round-trip expedition of an Oxfam convoy to Tawila, a town nearly two hours from El Fasher.

The better drivers know how to plow through the sandy drifts to firmer ground. Others simply get stuck, every wheel of their towering transport trucks sunk in the sand. For these drivers, patience is paramount. It could be a long time before they dig out again.

At Zam Zam station, a small trading post of thatched stalls near one of the camps for homeless people, a collection of trucks headed toward Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, has pulled off to the side of the road. Piled high with jerry cans, sacks, plastic chairs, and wooden pallets—all powdered with dust—the trucks look like they're here to stay. Banditry plagues South Darfur and the speculation is that the trucks, with their valuable cargo, dare not make the journey—yet.

So, the drivers wait, catching up on their sleep in the midday heat. One has pulled out a bed strapped to the back of his cab. Others tinker with a giant gear pried loose from the underbelly of a truck. Two watermelons cool in the shade behind one of the wheels.

Endurance, I think, must be a prized virtue among those in the Darfur driving profession.

In this poor and undeveloped place, the four-legged conveyances that compete stubbornly for street space seem more reliable than the four-wheeled variety. Donkeys don't get flats. They don't guzzle gas or require painstaking repairs or expensive new parts. All they need is food and water.

But at Kebkabiya, thousands of these precious donkeys suffered a grim fate last summer. They died of starvation, their carcasses littering the streets.

The donkeys belonged to some of the 60,000 homeless people who have streamed into Kebkabiya after being driven from their villages by the ongoing violence. It wasn't easy for people to leave the town to gather the grasses their donkeys desperately needed. In June, July, and August, the sturdy animals began to die—2,800 of them.

"It was a very big problem," recalls Esther Kabahuma, one of Oxfam's public health promoters. There were so many carcasses around that people began shoving them into the nearby riverbed to get rid of them.

"This town was stinking," adds Kabahuma.

Somehow, linking that word—stinking—to these dependable beasts sums up the sad truth of Darfur: What was good has gone bad. Even the completion of the West Salvation Road might not be enough to bring back the old Darfur.

In the camps where people driven from their homes now live, they make shelters from any scraps they can find: cardboard, strips of cloth, frayed pieces of plastic. In the streets of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, goats nose through the slim pickings in the trash pits outside the homes, but there is little in them. Everything here seems to get used, and reused. In the market, shopkeepers wrap the produce in artfully folded bags they make from old newspapers. Tin cans morph into pitchers.

On this morning, we have been bouncing along in a Land Cruiser on the long and dusty road to Tawila, where Oxfam has been building latrines and bathing shelters at nearby Dalih camp. Mindful of the rules of this holy month, I have been trying not to take swigs from my water bottle, at least not in public. I'm parched, so when we make a brief stop at the Oxfam guesthouse I sneak a sip before climbing back into the truck—still thirsty.

Just then, an aid worker opens the door and quickly passes through a bag. Inside are four bottles of Pepsi, miraculously cold and beaded with condensation: one for each of us Westerners.

"As I said, American imperialism at work," crows one of my colleagues, twisting off the top and swallowing his drink with pure pleasure as the Land Cruiser lurches off again.

It's good. So good. Pepsi never tastes like this at home—not when you can have it whenever you want. Here, at high noon during Ramadan, it's illicit, and I savor it even more because of that-not knowing the best is yet to come.

When we finish our drinks, someone unrolls the window and, with a heave, sends one of the empty bottles flying out. To my surprise, another goes, and another.

I'm the only one left clutching a bottle, and I intend to hang on to it: How could they be trashing the place so wantonly? It's dusty and empty out there, but that's no reason to muck it up with sticky plastic bottles.

Go ahead, urge my colleagues. Toss it. It's not trash. The bottles are like treasure for the kids. They love them.

Treasure? I think of the photo I saw recently of boys in one of the camps playing with a small toy truck they had made from found parts. I remember hearing that other children save bits of plastic twine they find and weave them into jump ropes.

I unroll my window and wrestle for a second more with my own political correctness. Then, with the thrill of doing something wrong that is now suddenly right, I let go of the bottle. I have littered! Or have I recycled?

It's the latter, I'm quite sure.

"This is a bonanza to them to have these plastic bottles," explains Sally Field somewhat later. She is a public-health promoter working out of Oxfam's El Fasher office. In the courtyard near the kitchen at the office lies a heap of used plastic water bottles. I wondered at first why they were left there. Now, I understand, they have a destination—a very useful second life.

The ones the kids don't use to tote their water around in will wind up in the local market where shopkeepers fill them with the juice they squeeze and sell, says Field.

"The bottles are sacred," she adds.

"The kids come knocking on our door asking for them. They play with them," says Leslie Morris, an Oxfam staffer working on hygiene promotion in the town of Kebkabiya. "I like how they recycle things here. The last time I was in El Fasher I brought back as many of those pop bottles as I could."

Morris plans to adapt the bottles for use in the hand-washing program she is promoting. She'll punch small holes in the tops so the water can dribble out like a portable faucet.

Now that I'm tuned in, I begin to see the precious bottles everywhere: tucked under a child's arm for safekeeping, attached to a bit of wire for a toy, a circle of them planted in the hard earth as a colorful garden surround.

Knowing about the underground life of plastic bottles makes that Pepsi even sweeter—and maybe less illicit—than it was during Ramadan.

From flooding in Haiti to drought in Ethiopia, water has long been central to Oxfam's work. Our emergency water systems are a hallmark of our agency. And our efforts to help communities access water for farming and fishing enable people to realize security.

But in recent decades, some extraordinary water pressures have emerged, as water resources are being swallowed up by dams, mining, and other commercial projects. The result is that, for the villages along the rivers, in the watersheds, and on the floodplains of East Asia being swamped or dried up by dams…for the indigenous people and farmers of South America whose rivers, lakes, and wells have been destroyed by mining…water is quickly becoming a major issue—and a major issue for Oxfam.