my hosts at Oxfam America

For better and for worse, America as a country findsidentidy in action. Action, at times, has proved reckless, at others, beneficial. Action is seen in the work and influence of organizations like Oxfam; organizing volunteers, students, planners, and assorted specialists to take on the enormous tragedies of world poverty and hunger. But the focus on listening and local control is a one lacking in large portions of American foriegn policy.

For all the good intentions of soldiers and war supporters, the results are frustrating at best when listening and partnership aren’t prioritized. No matter how poorly a leader like Saddam ruled, if the alternative is presumptuous and culturally ignorant interference, then what one person says is liberation, another says is occupation.

That idea is such a basic, psychological reality, and Oxfam impressed me as using that simple idea to shape and direct major change. Throughout my interviews with Oxfam workers, the stress was on understanding the local context and letting local peoples make their own decisions. Even in war-torn countries, stress was laid on bringing all affected parties to the table; greater conflict heavily predicable otherwise.

A continuation of the American idea of Manifest Destiny, that it is up to the US to mold the world to it’s image, to socially-at the least-conquer every frontier is not only proud, but reckless. Obvious egotistic issues aside, on a practical level, international exportation of American Democracy is mathematically impossible. Americans make up 6% of the world’s population, but consume 60% of it’s resources… it can’t add up!

And that inequality is part of what Oxfam seeks to take on; not simply throwing money at crisises, but digging at the root causes, including how one country’s economic policy affects another. The world is complexly interconnected with indiginous people relating to the government, relating to corporations, and so on. As much as exploitation occurs as big industry seeks to make a quick buck at the expense of indiginous populations, the answer is not to destroy corporations, but to create mutual respect between local peoples, national governments, and international business. Partnership, not profit is the goal, and Oxfam works through advocacy, localized skills training, humanitarian effort, and more to represent the voices that are often pushed aside.

But there is much to be done at home too. Learn about world economics and some of the reasons why 6% consumes 60% (www.storyofstuff.com(not endorsed by Oxfam, but very compelling)).

-Last year I got to participate in an Oxfam Hunger Banquet where “ Guests draw tickets at random that assign them each to either a high-, middle-, or low-income tier and receive a corresponding meal. The 15 percent in the high-income tier are served a sumptuous meal. The 35 percent in the middle-income section eat a simple meal of rice and beans. The 50 percent in the low-income tier help themselves to small portions of rice and water.” It was definitely an eye-opener for me, not just to see in percentages how privlidged I was, but to realize that I’m nothing special that I should be getting so much more than the majority of the world’s citizens. It’s such a myth to say that the poor and hungry are lazy and deserving of their desperate situations, most work harder days on much less food, yet many still continue that myth. In your own school or church or camp or nieghborhood though, you can hold a provoking hunger banquet and get people thinking: http://www.oxfamamerica.org/whatyoucando/take-action/fast. Began it’s self as a group of concerned students, Oxfam provides the resources for your community to become involved in these processes that, conscious or not, we all contribute in one way or another to http://www.oxfamamerica.org/whatyoucando/take-action

Educate yourself, learn more! Read books by authors like Noam Chomsky, or one of the ones that rocked my worldview, highly recomended: Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. If you think the rich and the poor get what they fairly earn, there’s alot to learn. However cliche it sounds, the answer is in thinking globally and acting locally. And Oxfam provide plenty of ways in which to act.