LSP Environmental Studies Community Event Reports

by: Katherine Snedden
On October 15th, I attended the lecture, “Saving Lives: Changing Horizons in Humanitarian Response” at 5 Washington Place. At the reception, which began at 6:30, I found myself surprised at the mix of people at the event. There were a few who looked to be students, but most were older folks- the sort that could actually donate to an organization like Oxfam. Others were participants or employees in other humanitarian organizations, who I assumed was interested in looking at Oxfam’s methods to improve their own. After our fill of cheese and grapes, we went down around 7:30 for the power-point presentation by Dr. Miriam Aschkenasy, a bubbly and talkative woman who was obviously very passionate about Oxfam and her field work in numerous countries around the world. The lecture in particular focused on Moyale, Ethiopia and the efforts to not only aid, but prevent, disasters such as famine and drought.
The lecture was in the format of power-point and began stating the overall purpose of Oxfam and their plans for the future of humanitarian aid. Oxfam is well-known for their aid in helping people with water and sanitation, decreasing the prevalence of disease and other disasters. However, Oxfam is now interested in the possibilities of evidence based programming to incorporate into emergency response. What this essentially means is that in order to prevent famine, drought, or disease, data must be collected from individuals living in the community. Over time, Oxfam will actually be able to predict when disaster will occur and help prevent it. Though this method is incredibly time-consuming and still in the pilot stage, graphs from over the past couple of years revealed that aid was more effective when Oxfam was able to track Moyale so closely. Oxfam employees would go from village to village and ask questions to the few women responsible for giving data. Only women were asked to be data collectors because in that culture women do most of the work, including retrieving water, taking care of the household, and keeping track of food. So they would ask the women like on a scale of one to ten how much cleaner or dirtier the water was. The trick to this system is also to be respectful of the African culture. For example, one cannot simply ask about food because it would be rude, so the Oxfam people would have to figure out other ways to find out food supply without offending the villagers. After all the data was collected, it was put into a graph to show, for example, the number of meals per day a family ate over the months. From the graph, it was clear that after January there was a sharp drop in the number of meals eaten, so Oxfam was immediately able to respond and give aid as soon as possible. After the lecture, there was a Q&A session in which members from the audience asked questions. One was “how do you keep the women honest?”, which I found to be a very good question. The response was the villages were so far apart that it would be impossible for the women to get together and come up with a certain answer that would work to their advantage. If even one village was lying, the other villages’ data would point it out.
Not having much knowledge on humanitarian organizations, I truly enjoyed the Oxfam lecture and would absolutely like to learn more about the organization. I liked the idea of evidence based programming and I have a lot of respect for the people involved who painstakingly collect data and travel hours upon hours to help these communities. Now that I’ve had a brief introduction to humanitarian work, I’d like to know more about it and how I can get involved. This event has great value to the community in that it looks outside of the NYU bubble I live in to bring light to global issues and the different possibilities to mitigate them. I wouldn’t say the people at Oxfam are doing a service to the environment, but rather the people living in it. The lecture definitely achieved its aims because I came away feeling more knowledgeable about Oxfam and its future plans for delivering aid to countries all over the world, including the United States. To improve the event, I would have liked more background information about what Oxfam has done in the past. Most people there already knew about the organization, but I, being clueless, did not and would have liked a little more context. Other than that, I would say the only way to broaden its impact would be to get more people involved. Oxfam relies on donations and volunteers for support.
Overall, I found the event to be worth my time and in the future I would consider going to more Oxfam events. I already plan to do my own research and look further into what the organization accomplishes. I chose this event because it looked like it could be educational and would relate to our studies on human population and food. I was impressed with the presenter and the lecture as a whole, as it made me want to learn more.

Link:
http://www.oxfam.org/