News & Media

Ida Bere, Zimbabwe. Photo: Abbie Trayler-Smith/OxfamAUS

We don’t have to go far to get water here in New Zealand. We can just turn on the kitchen tap, the bathroom tap, the outdoor hose, pop to the dairy, open our mouths during one of Auckland’s notorious downpours, the options are endless. None of them really involve a huge amount of effort, and all of them are, most of the time, safe.

Others around the world aren’t so lucky. In developing countries, women and children, mostly, are spending huge amounts of time each day fetching something that literally falls from the sky. And the average amount of water they use each day is merely the same amount of water used in one flush of a Western toilet.

Most of the water that these women and children collect is incredibly dirty and unsafe for consumption – in fact, nearly two billion people around the world have to face the tough decision between drinking dirty water that could make them sick, and not drinking at all. A lot of the time, they take the risk in pursuit of hydration. You would do the same, wouldn’t you? How far would you go to get water?

Walk nine hours?

Photo: Abbie Trayler-Smith/OxfamAUS

Ida, from Zimbabwe, is one of the most incredible mothers you’ll ever meet. Every day she wakes at 4am to make the first of three trips to ensure her, her husband and their six children have enough water. Each trip is an hour and a half one way, meaning she spends a total of nine hours each day fetching water.

“At times when the river is not flowing and the water is just stagnant, I take my hoe and dig by the river bed. I dig in the sand so that water comes out and I scoop that water.”

Put it before education?

“My girls are school-going age, they need to read, do their homework and concentrate on their schoolwork. But because they have to do these trips to fetch water, they don’t have enough time to do their homework.”

The countless hours spent traipsing to collect water takes time from each day that should be spent working or learning — this entrenches the cycle of poverty.

“The time that we are wasting walking up and down to fetch water is productive time that is wasted.”

Fetch the same stuff that people and animals bathe and toilet in?

Photo: Abbie Trayler-Smith/OxfamAUS

“It’s not safe water, because at the river, you find people upriver will be having their baths, doing their laundry – and I fetch water down river.

“I see human waste flowing along the river. I just push it aside and continue fetching my water… that human waste is not good for water consumption. But I have no choice, that’s the only source of water.”

The contaminated water makes Ida’s children sick very often.

“They have ‘running stomachs’, diarrhoea, due to drinking that unsafe water.”

But you and Oxfam are stepping in, and are fundraising to build a borehole. Ida believes the construction of a borehole – a deep hole with a hand pump in the top used to extract water from the ground – will effectively solve her community’s water issues. Boreholes are fairly expensive to construct and maintain, but they supply ample high quality water year round.

Go without for days at a time?

In eleven-year-old Evelyn’s drought-declared village in rural Kenya, a fuel-powered generator would fill the solitary 24,000-litre water tank once every eight days. After two to four hours, all the water in the tank would have been used. Families like Evelyn’s only had water access for two hours every eight days.

Photo: Nichole Sobecki/Panos/OxfamAUS

“When there is water in my village, life flows. It feeds our animals, and keeps us well. And when we are healthy we can go to school, and learn, and grow.”

Once families had used up the clean water they got from the tank – what they obtained from the water tank usually lasted only a day or two – they’d get whatever they could from the nearby saltwater lake, or by digging holes in the dry river bed and extracting the water from there.

Choose it over health?

Photo: Nichole Sobecki/Panos/OxfamAUS

As a last resort, people in Evelyn’s community would drink from a nearby lake that’s highly saline, alkaline, contains high levels of fluoride. It is riddled with algae, sediment, faeces, the remains of dead animals, crystallised salt and rubbish. Drinking it can cause severe illnesses – vomiting, diarrhoea, skin and eye infections, dehydration, bone deformities, joint swelling and pain, and dental fluorosis – but people would turn to this supply if they really needed it. This crisis forced people to make incredibly tough decisions between water and health.

“Every day the sun takes more and more water for us, leaving only bad water that not even our animals will drink. Even they know it means death.”

But you and Oxfam stepped in. Together with our partners, we installed a solar-powered water system which has increased the community’s access to clean water from once every eight days to once every three days.

We also provided training in maintaining and managing the water system, and our partners drilled boreholes and installed new tanks to further water provision for the community.

Photo: Nichole Sobecki/Panos/OxfamAUS

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Water, sanitation and hygiene underpin many of our poverty-fighting development projects. We always work with local people, ensuring that they lead our developments based on what they believe the best solution for them and their community is. In 2015/16, we provided 5.4 million people with improved access to clean water, and we’re still working to reach more and more people in need.

Read more about our water and sanitation work in the Pacific

Winnie Byanyima during her recent visit to Nigeria – a nation on the brink of famine. Photo: Tom Saater/Oxfam

The passionate and wise Winnie Byanyima, head of Oxfam International, came to visit New Zealand for the first time last week.

She spoke on everything from the huge number of displaced people around the world, the broken economic system and dangerous political power, to the devastating effects of the sale of arms, the unprecedented four famines across Africa and in Yemen, and the US withdrawal from the Paris Accord and climate change.

Below is part two of the top five things Winnie Byanyima said while she was here in NZ.

On the broken economic system and dangerous political power

“You can see that rich companies have been pushing wages down. In the last 30 years wages have not risen globally, but they increase their reward at the top. They pay peanuts to their suppliers, and then the shareholders take more and more of the profits out of the companies… this kind of business model that maximises for shareholders and cheats the worker, cheats the producer, cheats the consumer and destroys the environment is what we must change.”

– Interview with Kim Hill, Radio New Zealand

“We’re not against globalisation, but it has to be a globalisation that benefits all; workers, producers, the planet, communities. We can’t have globalisation that’s based on rewarding just the owners of capital. That’s a wrong and unjust globalisation.”

– Interview with Corin Dann, TVNZ’s Q+A.

“Poverty is a political problem. Poverty and injustice are rooted in powerlessness – and we tackle power. We tackle governments. We tackle companies. We ask them to do justice to ordinary people. There is no way we are going to end poverty without being political in that sense… we speak truth to power.”

– Interview with Corin Dann, TVNZ’s Q+A.

“All of us need to work as citizens to claim back power. Power has been taken by a few economic elites working in collusion with a few political elites. It’s a global problem.”

– Interview with Kim Hill, Radio New Zealand

On the four famines

“Famine is a failure because you can see it coming and you can stop it if you take the right actions. The responsibility first and foremost lies with the governments… it’s also a failure of the international community. We have a common humanity, we have commitments, we have made a law that we will respond, we will not let people die… when people die it diminishes my humanity, even though it’s another part of the world.”

– An Evening with Winnie Byanyima, Q Theatre event.

Missed part one?

The passionate and wise Winnie Byanyima, head of Oxfam International, came to visit New Zealand for the first time last week.

She spoke on everything from the huge number of displaced people around the world, the broken economic system and dangerous political power, to the devastating effects of the sale of arms, the unprecedented four famines across Africa and in Yemen, and the US withdrawal from the Paris Accord and climate change.

Want all of that in a nutshell? You’ve come to the right place. Here’s a collection of the top five things Winnie said on these important topics whilst here in New Zealand, part one.

On the US withdrawal from the Paris Accord and climate change

“I think this American decision on the Paris Agreement is a real opportunity for the rest of the world to be angry and, therefore, more ambitious about tackling climate change… I’m seeing an opportunity to re-mobilise. And I think, New Zealand, you should lead. This is a region that’s facing the consequences right now.”

– An Evening with Winnie Byanyima, Q Theatre event.

“This is a story that New Zealanders and people in the Pacific understand so well because you’re already facing it. Everywhere I hear the stories of people who are being wiped out by cyclones, by hurricanes – you’re at the forefront of this and you need to lead the world to demand that rich countries put down climate financing to help those who have not caused it, but who are facing the consequences.”

– Interview with Kim Hill, Radio New Zealand

“My uncle in my village in Uganda, who’s just a herdsman, would take 180 years to emit the same carbon emissions as an ordinary American citizen would in one year. It’s not fair for them to walk away.”

– Interview with Kim Hill, Radio New Zealand

“This is the greatness that’s in humanity. What we are seeing today is that actually the poor countries, the developing countries, are showing more leadership on climate change than the rich countries who have the means to solve the problem and who caused the problem.”

– Interview with Kim Hill, Radio New Zealand

On the refugee crisis

“Today my country, Uganda, very poor country, has more than a million South Sudanese refugees. We open our doors and we say ‘come and share what we have, we are poor, but we can’t let you die’. That is the principal of humanity, of humanitarianism, that all these countries signed on in the United Nations and are now turning their backs on… these are not people just escaping to look for a better future, they’re fleeing for their lives.”

A special thank you to Kiwi supporters from Winnie herself:

Want more? Click here for part two.

Here’s your mission. Ensure a newborn has safe passage down the crocodile-infested Nile River, protect first-born Hebrew sons from death at the hands of Egyptian soldiers, unlock 10 commandments, and lead your followers to the Promised Land.

Should you choose to accept, you’ll be providing hope to refugees around the world – thanks to an initiative started by Chinh and Khoa Vu.

Khoa (left) and Chinh Vu. Photo: Courtesy of Ayotree

Their adventure game, Moses the Freedom Fighter, educates players about the refugee experience while raising funds for Oxfam’s work with refugees.

It’s the Vus’ first venture into gaming, but even more remarkable than this accomplishment is their decision to donate all proceeds to Oxfam’s refugee fund, which benefits millions of people who have been displaced by conflict in Syria and other countries, including Yemen and Iraq. Though free to download and play, all money brought in by ads goes toward supporting refugees. They’ve also set up a donation page.

Khoa describes the decision to team up with Oxfam as a no-brainer. Chinh and Khoa—raised by parents who escaped a totalitarian regime in Vietnam and immigrated to the United States as refugees—know first-hand what it’s like to flee from a life of oppression and tyranny.

Chinh set off on a high-stakes voyage from Vietnam to freedom when he was six years old. His father was a high-ranking officer in the South Vietnamese Army. After the war, he was sent to a re-education camp and during that time, Chinh was cared for by his grandparents. When his father was released in 1979, he told Chinh, “We’re going on a little trip.” That trip turned out to be their escape.

Chinh and a number of other family members, including his father and younger brother Joe, were part of the mass migration from Vietnam by boat—a group later termed “boat people.” During the treacherous journey, they were lost at sea for three days before their SOS sign was sighted by a fishing boat that pulled them in to the mainland. In the scuffle, two female relatives got caught in a riptide and drowned. The Vus were stationed at a refugee camp on Pulau Bidong, an island off the coast of Malaysia, which at the time hosted as many as 40,000 refugees, before they were resettled to the United States.

Khoa, a decade younger, was born in the US, but he too was shaped by the Vu family origin tale. “I heard stories from my parents about this crazy boat voyage,” he says. “They endured pirates and people drowning. Now, the images we’re seeing of Syrian refugees look so similar. I’ll sit down with my mom to watch TV and she’ll say, ‘the boat people, we are the same;’ she recognizes herself.”

Video game fanatics themselves, bulding their own game was a dream of theirs. They began developing it over a year and a half ago. Then, just as they were finishing up their game, President Trump signed an executive order barring refugees from Muslim-majority countries from the US.

What started out as a simple game became a symbol of resistance.

“All of a sudden there’s this ban, and it was like wait a second, hold on, we come from a refugee family,” said Khoa. “We realised the same thing keeps happening, whether it’s the Syrians of today, the Vietnamese of yesterday, or Hebrews during Moses’ time.”

Moses the Freedom Fighter was released in March. Since then, it has been translated into 14 languages and downloaded and played more than 5,000 times by people in 29 countries. “After we released the game, we found that it connected with a lot of people,” says Khoa.

The Vus set a fundraising goal of $10,000 by World Refugee Day on June 20. As of June 15, they have raised more than $2,000. For Khoa and Chinh, the most fulfilling part of the experience is seeing their message of empathy and acceptance for those who have faced down genocide, intolerance, and injustice not only amplified, but reflected through support for their fund.

“Ultimately, the statement we’re making is not political,” says Khoa. “It’s humanitarian. This game is for anyone—from refugees to undocumented immigrants to migrant workers—who has been pushed to the outskirts of society, or felt the hand of oppression.”

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Derived from the blog by Divya Amladi (Oxfam America)

The game is available for download via iTunes and Google Play.

For more information on the game, visit http://www.freemoses.org/

Help the brothers reach their goal!

The rare story of a Syrian family who came to Europe on a humanitarian visa

Text: Laura Hurtado / Oxfam Intermón

The story of this family is unusual. Most Syrian refugees who have made it to Europe have got there illegally and by taking perilous journeys. War in their homeland and Fortress Europe left them no other option.
But here is a different Syrian tale, which shows there are other ways to give sanctuary to those fleeing the war.

Syria: where it begins

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Petite, bright-eyed Syrian Fatem remembers well the fear she felt when the war broke out in her hometown of Raqqa. She still shivers at the thought. “We were living in the heart of the conflict. Every time we kissed each other goodnight we thought it could be the last time,” she recalls.

Due to the conflict, her husband Khalil couldn´t work and so money was tight. They were expecting their first child but couldn´t see a doctor. Amid the water and supply shortages, the final straw came when Ahmed was born and they couldn´t buy any milk to feed him as there was none. “That was the moment when we clearly realized we couldn´t stay in Syria anymore,” says Khalil. He decided to go to Lebanon to find a job and a place to live – his young family would then join him.

The most prized possession that he brought with him was a photo album showing their happy days in Syria: their wedding; their parents; the beautiful house they lived in; the land he used to work.

First stop: Lebanon

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The day when Khalil arrived in Lebanon he had to sleep on the streets. It was like a premonition; a clear warning that nothing in this country would be easy.

For four years, the family struggled to make ends meet in Lebanon, a small country with the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, and where 70% of Syrian refugees live below the poverty line. Khalil has worked as an electrician, a plumber and a painter, but despite this, he has had to seek out loans more than once in order to feed his family, which has grown with the birth of Mohamed, who is now 1 year old.

Their home is a small, cramped and dark room in a town in Mount Lebanon, an hour away from Beirut. The rent is lower here than in the capital. “In the beginning, the floor was bare earth and the roof was leaking. The landlord refused to fix it”, says Khalil. Their kitchen is outside, where it is hard to cook especially in the freezing snowy winters. The children often fall ill and Fatem now has an allergy, leading to a persistent cough and bouts of vomiting. “I suffocate in this room,” she says.

The promise of a new life

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One day, Khalil learned from a neighbour there was a possibility to travel to Italy with a humanitarian visa – meaning in a safe and legal way.

After much research, the family met with the Italian organisations that have been working on securing humanitarian visas for Syrian refugees through humanitarian corridors. This initiative aims to avoid deaths at sea, and human trafficking: the Italian government has agreed to receive 1,000 refugees in two years through this project. While welcome, this is just a token number as the conflict in Syria has pushed more than  5 million people to become refugees in neighbouring countries. But those behind this initiative want to focus on how lives can be saved if there is a political will, rather than on the numbers, for now.

Dreams

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At first, Fatem was sceptical. She thought that they wouldn´t be chosen to travel to Italy. But, after a few interviews, the family was selected.

Syrian refugees have to meet a number of criteria in order to receive humanitarian visas. A key criterion is that they are in a vulnerable situation, such as families with young children.  According to UNHCR, this vulnerable status also applies to unaccompanied minors, single mothers, the elderly and sick, and those who have been abused or tortured.

Why a person wants to go to Italy is also taken into account as well as their chances at success in a new environment. “Adaptation is not the same for a young educated person as for an illiterate elderly one,” explains Simone Scotta, from Mediterranean Hope, who has been working on the family’s case from Lebanon. “Many Syrian refugees think everything will improve once in Italy, but we insist on explaining that the culture is very different, that nobody speaks their language and that they will lose the support network they have in Lebanon.”

The farewell

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The night before the flight, Khalil and Fatem couldn’t sleep. They had been crossing out the days on their calendar for months, their suitcases ready and waiting in a corner of their tiny home. They shed some tears, feeling happy and sad: torn by their situation.

They were leaving behind all those they had shared four years with their cousin’s family, who welcomed them into their home during their first month and who shared with them what little they had, and their neighbours, most of them Syrian, who had fled to Lebanon just like them.

But above all, they were moving further away from their dear Syria. This journey would take them far away from their loved ones, from their culture, from their land.

A heavy blow

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The journey took 24 hours, starting at 4am in Beirut and ending in the city of Cecina in the middle of Tuscany. During the bus trip from Rome to their new home, they found out they would have to share a flat with another Syrian refugee family. This bit of news left them perplexed and fraught.

But they soon found out from Oxfam, the NGO in charge of their accommodation during their first year, that this was a temporary measure. Though they would eventually have their own home, it was made clear that renting property as a refugee can be a tricky task.

Italy: the end of the journey

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Upon their arrival to Tuscany, two Italian social workers from Oxfam brought them to their new temporary home: a sunny flat with a garden, a big living room with a fitted kitchen, three bedrooms, central heating, a washing machine and a TV.

Via a translator, the family learnt that they would receive money every month to buy food, medicine and other essentials, for six months. They would also have WiFi in the apartment and home-based Italian language lessons so they don’t have to leave their children. The family would also receive help in how to apply for asylum and look for jobs. At the end of the six months, the family would be considered self-sufficient.

“I never imagined we would end up living in Italy. I thought the war would only last for two or three years, but the situation just gets worse,” comments Khalil as he tunes in to an ArabicTV channel to get the latest news from Syria.  “I hope people in Europe don´t think we are terrorists or extremists. We are here because we are running away from them, from the conflict.” Fatem adds: “We want a future for our children. That is why we are willing to learn a new language and adapt to different customs.”

When we say goodbye, we ask them if they would like to go back to Syria when the war ends – if they would like this tale to end where it began. “Of course we will go back,” Fatem says without the shadow of a doubt. “But if a long time passes and my children feel established here, we will only go back to visit. The stability of our family comes first.”

Photos: Pablo Tosco/Oxfam