Balcha, a 36-year-old widow, has brought us to her home here in the Ethiopian community of Mallima Bari as a sort of bench mark—a way for us to understand where she is in her life at this moment and where she’s determined to go now that she has access to irrigation and the support of a network of other small farmers like herself.
“I will reconstruct my house and show you a better house,” says Balcha firmly. “When I change my house, I will make you coffee.” In Ethiopia, ceremoniously serving guests coffee—three piping hot cups per person—is an important social tradition.
Recently, Balcha joined a group participating in a project launched by Oxfam America’s partner, Sustainable Environment and Development Action, or SEDA. Tapping a well that they helped dig and that SEDA and Oxfam outfitted with a pump and pipes, Balcha and 34 other farmers are funneling water to nine hectares of land--about 24 acres, or a little more than half an acre each. Now, at last, they are free from worry about whether the rain will come on time and in sufficient quantity to guarantee their harvests. With a flick of a switch, they have water on demand—water to feed their crops and build their dreams.
Sitting in front of a field crowded with tall corn, Balcha beams with a surety that would not have been possible a year or so ago. Grief consumed her then: Her oldest child, a 9-year-old boy, had drowned one day while she was away working as a laborer. His dream had been to go to school and he had begged her to send him. But Balcha didn’t have the means.
“He asked me, ‘please, my mom, buy me an exercise book,” she recalled. Her answer? “Next year I can buy you an exercise book and clothes, but this year we don’t even have food.”
Two months later, she said, the terrible accident happened.
In the year that followed, burdened by needs that she could barely meet, Balcha said she thought about leaving her family and running away.
“I was confused,” she said softly.
It was around then that she learned of the irrigation project and the opportunity to join it.
“I was suffering before I joined this project because I didn’t have my husband. I didn’t have any support,” said Balcha. ”Now I have clothes for my body, food for my stomach, and my field is in good condition. When you are hungry, you can’t think of getting satisfied. When you are thirsty you can’t think of getting enough water. But now I’m satisfied.”
Balcha’s story speaks for others in a district where many rural residents make their living by raising animals and cultivating crops on fields fed only by rain. But it’s a hard life—and sometimes an impossible one. In this Central Rift Valley, severe food shortages are a frequent problem.
Without money to put into better production—fertilizer for plants, and infrastructure for irrigation—farmers can’t easily coax much from their land. Instead, like Balcha, they rent their fields to investors who can afford the technology to reap bountiful harvests. And sometimes, small farmers become day laborers on land that is theirs, working for someone else’s profit instead of their own.
But for the group now tilling this 24-acre plot, a reliable source of water could change their lives and the lives of their families. The project is part of a broader Oxfam America water program, set to run through 2020, that works with communities and local partners to help some of the poorest Ethiopians in moisture-stressed regions access water for their fields and animals and manage the resource in a sustainable fashion. With water comes food—and resilience.
Here, in Mallima Bari, the hope is that farmers will begin to cultivate valuable market crops—onions, tomatoes, green peppers, cabbages—that could boost their incomes. From the sale of their harvests, participants, who have formed the Mallima Gale Small-Scale Irrigation Co-op, will pool 10 percent of their earnings toward keeping the irrigation enterprise running. One of the biggest costs is fuel, now running at about 17 birr per liter—close to $4 a gallon. It takes about six liters of fuel each time a farmer pumps water through a half-acre field.
But it’s not just the pump and water that have brightened prospects for Balcha, it’s the deeper connection she has made with her neighbors in the irrigation group and the spirit of cooperation.
“We have very good collaboration,” says Balcha, noting that she had her fields plowed with the help of co-op members and their oxen. Ethiopians measure their land in hectares. One hectare is nearly equal to 2.5 acres. Balcha’s irrigated plot of corn measures a quarter hectare. In addition, she has a half-hectare of rain-fed corn and a quarter hectare of Ethiopia’s staple grain, teff, which is also dependent on the rain.
New agricultural techniques she learned through SEDA could help her crops do better than they have in the past, and the results so far have made her optimistic. She is planting her corn in rows now instead of broadcasting it loosely, and expects the December harvest will produce enough to feed her family as well as some to sell.
“Physically, it looks healthy,” says Balcha. “When you look at it, you get encouraged.”
And with that feeling of encouragement comes the taste of possibility: For Balcha, that means school for her children—an opportunity she never had.
“Had I had an education, I would have been someone better than I am now,” says Balcha. “I’m in darkness myself. I want them to be in light.”
]]>Alami Bera is one such woman living in Ethiopia's Bacho district, about 50 miles southwest of Addis Ababa. A mother of twelve children, Alami and her husband toil on their farm to support eight of their unmarried children. Sometimes they are elated with their plentiful harvest, but other times they struggle to feed their large family. They work on their field year round to grow wheat and teff, and make the two-hour trek on foot to sell what they have harvested at the nearest open-air market. This is the same market that Alami walks to every week to purchase items for her family's consumption.
Up until the time Oxfam America partnered up with Oromo Self Reliance Association (OSRA) to launch the Sodo Liben Water Supply and Sanitation project, Alami, her family, and the other 3,000 people living in Sodo Liben locality had no access to clean drinking water and sanitation facilities. Waterborne diseases and other illnesses caused by lack of hygiene were rampant.
With heavy clay water pots on their backs, women and young girls traveled great distances on foot to fetch water from polluted streams. The hardship of fetching water increased as the dry season advanced, with the water levels dropping and the streams running dry. Women then would have to trudge down deep gorges and climb back up, lugging six gallons of water—about 50 pounds—on their backs.
For the 80 households living in Alami's village, the only near source of water was an ella, or traditional well, located at the heart of the village. The well, about 82 feet deep, had never been fit for drinking, but Alami had no choice other than to let her family drink from it. When the seasonal ella ran dry, Alami and the other women in her village walked two hours to fetch water from the nearest stream. One trip was never enough to meet the daily water needs of a family of 14. In a society where the burden of fetching water falls on women and young girls, Alami had to travel to the stream two or three times a day to fetch water.
"I knew the water I was giving my children was making them sick, but you have to know that I had no choice," said Alami. "I had only two choices. Either give my family filthy water to drink and bathe in or don't give them any water at all."
Ethiopia is known as the Water Tower of the Horn of Africa—a place with 12 river basins and vast underground reserves of water. Yet, the country has not been able to harness that potential. Countless traditional songs, poems, and proverbs praise the country's great rivers but lament the fact that the children of the mighty Blue Nile go thirsty while the river traverses boundaries to flow to far away lands and turn deserts into oasis. The irony is not lost on anyone.
Oxfam America set out on this project to provide a supply of clean drinking water and sanitation structures to improve health conditions and boost the productivity of people living in10 different sites within the district. Through this intervention, Oxfam America also intended to reduce the toil on women and young girls who had to walk great distances to fetch water. Oxfam and its partner constructed shallow wells, pit latrines, and washing stations and provided training to the communities on how to use them.
"Only a woman can fully appreciate what it means to have clean water near by," said Alami, pointing to the well and hand pump located only five yards from her thatch-roofed hut. "It now only takes me two minutes to pump out 7 gallons of clean water."
The hand-pumped well, which stands proudly in the middle of the village, is available five hours a day and the 80 households each get turns filling their jerricans for their daily use. The community imposed the five-hour limit to reduce wear and tear on the pump.
"What mother wouldn't give up everything she has to see her children's health restored?" asked Alami. "For the first time in our lives, our family is drinking and washing with clean water and using pit latrines."
Women in communities with the new wells are seeing some changes in gender role dynamics as more men are taking the initiative to fetch water for their families. It is a cultural taboo for a man to fetch water from a stream and carry it home on his back, so even the most helpful of husbands would only fetch water if the family owned a pack animal that could do the job.
"Imagine my husband sharing the water fetching responsibility with me," said Alami chuckling. "But he does it now, and I happily let him."
]]>Across Ethiopia, these are the images tied to cycles of drought that plague one of the poorest countries in the world. Most recently, a drought triggered a humanitarian crisis in early 2006 for more than 2.5 million people. Many of them were herders dependent on the rain to nourish pastureland for their animals—their central source of food and income.
Oxfam and the local organizations with which it works respond to these cycles of drought with both emergency assistance to ease the immediate suffering of people and their animals, and with programs aimed at longer-term solutions to address the region's severe water shortages and to improve the health of its livestock.
For example, in Afar, one of Ethiopia's northern regions, a water shortage in 2005 forced some people to walk up to four hours one way in search of the critical resource. Irregular and weak rainfall in the previous few years had caused pastureland to shrivel and water sources to disappear. About 90 percent of the people in Afar are herders, and many of their animals died as a consequence of the drought.
To help families survive, Oxfam and one of the local groups with which it works, the Afar Pastoralist Development Association (APDA), launched a project to truck water to three sites in Afar's Dubti district. The agencies set up 12 large tanks that could each hold 1,321 gallons of water. The trucks made daily deliveries to the tanks—the furthest of which was 70 miles from the well that provided the water.
Though only a temporary solution—and a costly one—the water trucking substantially relieved stress on the herders. Women who had been walking for eight to 10 hours to fetch water from a neighboring district had their trek cut to just a few kilometers.
In another area of Afar, Oxfam provided APDA with an $83,000 grant to offer veterinary care to 410,000 animals. The goal was to prevent the spread of common diseases such as Anthrax, Blackleg, and Pastereulosis.
More recently, in southern Ethiopia, Oxfam and another local partner, the Gayo Pastoral Development Initiative, worked on the restoration of a local pond so it could hold enough water to last between the sporadic rainy seasons. The pond is a central source of drinking water for the community's animals. As in Afar, many people in this part of the Oromiya region are herders.
The 2006 pond project did two things. It provided temporary work for local people hired to deepen the pond, thereby giving them a source of income to help tide them through the drought that was killing their animals. And secondly, the improvements will last into the future, ensuring that when the next drought comes the pond will be able to retain whatever limited amount of rain does fall.
Shortages of critical resources, such as water and pasture, can often spark conflict among different ethnic groups. A key part of Oxfam's work in parts of Ethiopia is peace-building—helping people find ways to resolve disputes without resorting to violence. Around the border town of Moyale in southern Ethiopia, for instance, Oxfam and the Research Center for Civic and Human Rights Education have established a series of peace councils whose job it is to intervene among sparring groups when tension begins to run high.
Elsewhere in Oromiya, Oxfam has been working with the Oromo Self-Reliance Association on a series of water supply projects that have improved the lives of 1,800 people in three communities about 50 miles southwest of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital. Oxfam contributed $42,000 to underwrite the cost of wells, pumps, bathing sheds, and laundry stations.
Before these improvements, women in one of the communities, Gura, were walking up to three hours a day to fetch water—and often it was dirty. The parasites that occasionally contaminated the water sickened the children who drank it. Now, for families in Gura, clean, cool water is just minutes away. A nearby pump taps into an aquifer 200 feet deep.
The water supply projects have made such a marked difference in people's lives that neighboring communities are now asking officials to make similar improvements in their villages.
Easy access to clean water, through projects like these, is critical in stemming the poverty that affects so much of Ethiopia. And they are part of the global drive to meet the Millennium Development Goals—a series of international targets aimed at cutting by half by 2015 the number of people around the world who do not have access to clean drinking water.
]]>Dhara Botara, a mother of eight in the remote community of Gura in Ethiopia’s Oromiya region, used to spend more than three hours each day walking to fetch water, sometimes accompanied by some of her children. The surface water she collected was often dirty and sometimes contaminated with parasites, which sickened her children.
Today, Dhara gets clean water twice a day from a new pump located just minutes from her home. In the morning and again in the afternoon, she visits the pump to haul back one or two five-gallon water containers. The water, from an aquifer 200 feet deep, comes out pure and cool.
In addition, she and her family now have access to a private bathing shed and a concrete washstand where they can wash their clothes and dishes.
The water project is one of three developed in the past year by the Oromo Self-Reliance Association with support from Oxfam America. Oxfam’s $42,000 contribution also underwrote the cost of the wells, pumps, bathing sheds, and laundry stations in two other communities besides Gura—Qamaxo and Alanqa—some 50 miles southwest of Addis Ababa. Altogether, some 1,800 people are benefiting from the water projects, which were inaugurated recently in separate ceremonies in the three communities.
"Clean water is just part of the equation," says Abera Tola, Oxfam America's regional director for the Horn of Africa. "Women now have more time to spend with their families, children can spend more time in school—the whole community benefits from these projects."
So popular are the water projects that neighboring communities have sent delegations to local authorities asking for the installation of similar facilities for their use.
Dhara and other beneficiaries in Gura pay 1 birr (about 12 cents) a month toward the upkeep of the washstand and pump, which is surrounded by a fence and open for six hours a day. But it’s clear from the smile on her face that the change it has brought to women in the community has been priceless.
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She was writing her name in Chinese characters, painstakingly shaping each slope and spike, trying to remember what she learned in school.
She'd lived her 30 years in this remote village on a mountain with no official name. She was a picture of dignity in a place facing difficult times.
For generations the people on this mountain had cut and sold timber. Then, just a few years ago, the Chinese government banned logging to conserve trees.
It was an important decision for the environment, one that helped protect the watershed of Lashi Lake. But it eliminated some important interaction for the Yi people who live here. An ethnic minority who only met with the lowland Han people when they sold their timber, they risked being left behind.
To survive the logging ban, the Yi needed a plan.
Green Watershed, an Oxfam America partner, came up with one. After consulting with the villagers, they discovered potatoes could replace timber as a cash crop. And the women who formed the backbone of the community could learn to speak Mandarin and write Chinese characters so they could sell and trade the potatoes to the Han at the base of the mountain.
In May, I went to China, Cambodia, and Thailand to capture stories like these, illustrating Oxfam America's work in Asia. I had never been to the region before. Like so many in the West, I knew about the extreme poverty only from the media.
But suddenly there I was filling notebooks with the results of our work, watching village after village preserve their way of life using their own expertise:
Rice farmers in Cambodia finding a niche in the market, creating the first organic rice mill in the country. Burmese refugees studying law, risking their lives to document human rights abuses back home. Fishers living on the Tonle Sap lake measuring the impact of over-fishing and developments planned for their community.
I marveled at the dignity of these men and women. They just wanted what we all want: to make a decent a living and feed their families.
Some sought to do the work their families had done for generations, only to watch the developed world encroach on their waterways and flood plains. Some needed to diversify and adapt their way of life.
But for others, the plan was even more ambitious. Let's say these communities make enough to get by.
Then what?
Then, it turns out, Oxfam partners help them learn how to participate in development decisions. They diversify their work options and insist on better governance. They put money away and buy farm equipment, fishing boats, tuition for their kids. They build health clinics, schools, and courtyards for meetings, traditional dancing, and singing with family and friends.
In short, when poor people aren't so poor anymore, they can effectively plan for the future.
What I saw during my travels illustrated the vast range of work Oxfam and its partners do in the regions.
And surrounding it all are the many challenges—few resources, limited participation in decision-making, outside interference, droughts, floods.
But somewhere in between, the work gets done.
A woman writes her name. A village survives.
]]>Amid cheers from a throng of enthusiastic supporters and international media, Make Trade Fair won the day.
Oxfam's trade campaign was launched.
Within hours of the Hong Kong debut, events were held in 25 cities including Brussels, Dublin, Geneva, Mexico City, San Salvador, and Washington, D.C. These events ranged from press conferences and symposiums to a rock concert in London’s Trafalgar Square.
Oxfam's trade campaign seeks to unite concerned citizens around the world in calling for fair trade policies that will help move millions of people out of poverty.
Nobel Prize Professor Amartya Sen, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and musician and social activist Bono were among those who endorsed the campaign. "Oxfam has got it right," said Bono. "It wouldn't cost much to change the rules of trade so that poor countries can work their way out of poverty. But the world's leaders won't act unless they hear enough people telling them."
Also in this issue of EXCHANGE, writers Frances and Anna Lappé discuss their book Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet, and we bring you updates on Oxfam's work with water and sanitation, drought in Ethiopia, and indigenous women in the highlands of Peru who are speaking out after decades of violence.
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