Photo by Sung Kim, courtesy Pitchfork Media

If you watched the Super Bowl last night, you may have caught a glimpse of the Oxfam America logo at the end of the commercial featuring will.i.am’s remix of the Who’s “My Generation.”  All proceeds from this high-profile new single will go to support Oxfam’s relief and recovery work in Haiti.

And will.i.am isn’t the only musician supporting Oxfam these days. Lots of bands, from chart-toppers to the relatively unknown, are hosting benefit concerts, putting out compilation CDs, recording public service announcements, and encouraging fans to donate via text message. My colleague Bob Ferguson blogged about some of these efforts a couple of weeks ago, and since then he’s been working with many more artists who want to contribute.

As a sometime music blogger, it amazes me to see these two worlds—music and NGO—collide in such unexpected ways. Then again, my fellow music geeks (uh, fans) are really passionate about the bands we love, so it only seems fitting to link that energy and dedication to a worthy cause.

Take Radiohead’s concert a couple of weeks ago in Los Angeles, where the band raised $572,000 to benefit Oxfam’s Haiti relief work. Fans bid in special auctions for tickets, and according to the Huffington Post, they paid an average of $440 each to see Radiohead perform at a smaller venue. Now that’s dedication. (For those of us who missed the Radiohead show, there are some great photos posted on Pitchfork Media, including a shot of Oxfam staffers in action.)

In the meantime, keep an eye on our website for more Oxfam and music news.

Severe deforestation is one of the underlying causes of poverty in Haiti. Photo by Abbie Trayler-Smith/Oxfam.

The earth was still shaking in Haiti when the questions started. Among the toughest and most important: Just why is Haiti the poorest country in the western hemisphere?

Economist Tyler Cowen offers a few theories in his blog Marginal Revolution. (Thanks to Yale economist Chris Blattman for the reference.) Cowen proposes the historic (premature independence), financial (huge debt to France that took 100 years to pay off following the revolution), agricultural (ways of growing coffee and sugar cane).  And of course, there is the political (the Duvalier clan wrecked Haiti). Cowen concludes that he is not particularly satisfied with any of these reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

A boy assembles a kite at the Petionville Club, a golf course in Port-au-Prince that now houses thousands of displaced earthquake survivors. Photo: Liz Lucas / Oxfam America

Oxfam America’s Coco McCabe is one of several Boston-based colleagues who traveled to Haiti to help with the relief effort. Here’s her latest update, dated February 1.

Tonight’s my last in Port-au-Prince before flying back to Boston. I arrived here about a week after earthquake.  And every day, as I visited the temporary camps where families have slung together shelters of bed sheets or cardboard, the intensity of human need seemed as fierce as the day before–for food, for work, for a decent place to sleep and bathe and go to the bathroom—even as Oxfam is building latrines and setting up water sources as fast as possible.

The hardship people are enduring is profound. I won’t forget it.

But there’s something else I won’t forget either: the ingenuity of the kids and their ability to set aside their worries, even if it’s for only a few minutes, and find the salve that sooths magically: play.

Today, I saw the best thing yet. It was at the crowded Centre Sportif de Carrefour, a sports complex where more than 2,000 people are camped on concrete and hard-packed earth. Weaving between the tents made of tarps from China were small boys—first one, then another, and another. All of them were pulling cars on strings. On closer examination, I realized the cars were small plastic juice jugs, outfitted with axels made from lollipop sticks, and wheels made from the red caps of other juice bottles. For ballast, the boys had loaded their cars with stones. Strips of plastic, tied together, served as strings for towing them.

They were ingenious.

Read the rest of this entry »

Oxfam America’s Coco McCabe is one of several Boston-based colleagues in Haiti to help with the relief effort. Here’s her latest update, dated January 30; this blog is part two of a two-part series.

Read part 1

I went back to that camp yesterday. I wanted to talk to other children there.

Photo: Coco McCabe / Oxfam America

One boy with a warm and gorgeous smile followed me around as I looked for kids to talk to. He listened carefully to the questions I discussed with one girl, and when I asked if I could talk with him as well, he said yes, his face bright with anticipation. His name is Sebastian Stermine and he is 12.

But as Sebastian told me his story, his voice fell almost to a whisper. I had to lean in close to hear him. He was sitting on the ground outside when the quake struck, he said. He jumped up and went to his mother, grabbing her for comfort, as did his two younger sisters. With their house in ruins, the small family wandered until they came to Delmas 62 and found a crowd gathering in the yard of a private compound whose walls had collapsed. They spent the night there—and have been there ever since, along with hundreds of other people. Oxfam is now digging banks of latrines for men and women at this makeshift camp.

Read the rest of this entry »

Coco McCabe interviews children at a camp for displaced people in Port-au-Prince. Photo: Kenny Rae / Oxfam America

Oxfam America’s Coco McCabe is one of several Boston-based colleagues in Haiti to help with the relief effort. Here’s her latest update, dated January 30; this blog is part one of a two-part series.

Buildings lie in heaps. Rubble blocks the roads. Streets serve as beds at night. But still, people here in Port-au-Prince are reclaiming bits and pieces of the old normal.

At a car wash, men hose the dust off their SUVs, delighting in the glimmer of the enamel beneath, some of it bashed by falling concrete. Nearby, I see a man bent over the spikes in an iron fence holding a paintbrush. He’s carefully touching up the nicks in the bright blue paint that dresses them up. Dust and chunks of collapsed buildings stretch along both sides of the street, but I get the feeling he sees only the strokes he applies, and finds relief in making his fence perfect.

With bravado, a shopkeeper has hauled his stock of upholstered chairs, vacuum cleaners, and toilet bowls out to the road’s edge in front of his store. Forget what’s happened, seems to be his message—as if people still had homes for these goods.

And a pair of teenagers—the girl about six inches taller than the boy–experiment with holding hands as they walk back and forth through the camp that’s now their home, blind to the tents and sheet shelters where parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends all crowd together for sleep at night.

In just seconds on Jan. 12, the world as Port-au-Prince had known it collapsed. All that had seemed so permanent—the concrete buildings, the stone retaining walls, the cinder block homes lining old alleys—was suddenly, terrifyingly gone.

And while some in Port-au-Prince are able to find ways to feel a bit of normalcy, I wonder about the children and how this disaster may have altered their perspective—and sense of security—forever.

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Workers assembling family kits. Photo: Oxfam

Oxfam America’s Coco McCabe is one of several Boston-based colleagues in Haiti to help with the relief effort. Here’s her latest update, dated January 29.

As devastating as the earthquake was for the people of Port-au-Prince, for some of them, there’s the thinnest of silver linings: jobs. Not necessarily long-lasting ones, but at least a few weeks’ worth of work that will put money in their pockets and help them weather the tough times ahead.

That’s how it is for 19-year-old Montinard Jean-Baptiste, who landed a job in an Oxfam warehouse not far from the airport, loading and unloading a stream of goods to help some of the people left homeless by the quake.

Jean-Baptiste is one of those homeless people. He’s now living in a cardboard shelter in a camp of about 600 people right behind the warehouse. With him are his aunt and uncle, who raised him and his four brothers and six sisters. All of them depend on the earnings his aunt makes from selling coffee and bread to people going to work in the morning. She supports the family.

Jean-Baptiste has managed to find some work in the past—for Coca-Cola, which has hired him for truck-loading stints 12 different times. But each time, after three months, the company has let him go. Oxfam is his second employer. And he says with the flood of aid groups pouring into the country—many of them needing help to carry out their work—part-time jobs have become more available.

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At the Petionville Club, where tens of thousands of people are camped, the hills undulate with bed sheets fastened to wooden poles—makeshift huts pitched on slopes so steep that no one inside could possibly get a good night's sleep. Photo: Liz Lucas / Oxfam America

Oxfam America’s Coco McCabe is one of several Boston-based colleagues in Haiti to help with the relief effort. Here’s her latest update, dated January 28.

After the roar of the day–the grinding, clanking, honking, chopping, and wailing of all the machines required for an emergency response—it’s a relief to slip into my tent, zip up the mosquito net, and listen to the night.

What do I hear? I’m not completely sure, since this is my first time in Haiti. I recognize the rooster, who winds up way before dawn. And though I can’t decipher the words, I understand the anguish in the voice of the man who shouts the same phrase over and over into the dark beyond our compound walls. Like many people here in Port-au-Prince, he’s stunned by the earthquake’s wreckage of life and property.

There are softer sounds too. A rustling in the low plants. The pat-pat of dried leaves falling on my tent roof. And is that rain?

I’ve been worrying about the rain since I got here, not because I’m concerned about getting soaked—my tent has a rain fly above it and a sturdy plastic tarp beneath it—but because of what I imagine will happen to the hordes of people now living in shelters made out of bed sheets or whatever scraps of plastic, cardboard, corrugated metal, or clothing they can find. Yesterday, I was in a hut with one wall made of ragged women’s dresses.

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