Oxfam Channel - update from the field

Update from Oxfam Australia chief executive direct from Cebu, Philippines, following the November 2013 typhoon humanitarian emergency

Caloline Gluck - Oxfam humanitarian press officer reports from the Al Hodeidah in the Yemen

Listen to a media teleconference with high-profile panel of experts on the need for better global regulation on arms trade ahead of the trial of Russian arms trader Viktor Bout.

Janna on her first impression as she arrives in Dadaab Camp in Kenya.

This is Caroline Gluck Oxfam’s Humanitarian Press Officer. It’s my second day in Harper, a city which is the capital of Maryland county, and it’s where we’ve seen a huge influx in the number of refugees in the last week alone. I went back down to a disused, abandoned school building which is now a temporarily home to more than 4,750 people – refugees, people who’ve fled from the Ivory Coast. And it’s a site where Oxfam has been doing work putting in drinking water and water they can use for household uses, installing latrines and washing facilities. Today was quite a difficult day. I heard some really graphic and quite disturbing stories from people about some of the violence that they’d witnessed before they fled for their lives and came across to Liberia. There was one woman, a mother of three. She told me that her husband had been clubbed to death, that he was actually beaten with sticks from the forest, and he died. She was hiding in the bush with her children, and then she came over here...

Caroline Gluck, Oxfam spokesperson at the border of Liberia and Ivory Coast.

This is Caroline Gluck, Oxfam’s Humanitarian Press Officer, and I’ve been visiting border areas in Liberia, very close to where the fighting’s been in Ivory Coast. Today I went to Wedger’s (?) main hospital, the Market Hoplin (?) Memorial Hospital, where doctors told me they treated more than 15 people for gunshot wounds, injuries sustained when they were trying to leave their villages which were under attack by armed rebels. I met one of them, his name was Simon Tay(?), he’s 29 from the village called Saidly (?) which is in the district called Tillelepleur (?) and he told me he’s a farmer. He told me a story of how he got the gunshot wound. His family had fled the house when the fighting broke out. But they came back the next day because they wanted to try and get some food, and his sister was with him. But when they were in the house, gunmen entered again. He and his sister got separated, he then called out to find her, rushed towards her and held out his hand when a bullet went through his hand and went into his sister who fell on the ground. He fled and for the last two weeks, having made his way, a journey of four or five days, to Liberia, he’s been the last two weeks in hospital being treated. Obviously really devastated. He’s lost two fingers, he says he doesn’t think he’ll be able to work as a farmer in the future, and he’s not sure if his sister is dead or alive. These are some of the human tales of suffering as a result of the last month or so of fighting in Ivory Coast. It’s not just people like Simon who’ve been affected, but um, when many families fled and they’ve had a couple of days journey reaching Liberia, it’s been very difficult for the women especially, some of whom were heavily pregnant. Some even gave birth in the forest. And one thing that the hospital has seen is a lot of women who’ve come in severely anaemic , they’ve had to have blood transfusions, and they’ve been treated. Also, affected are some children, some who were already sick in the Ivory Coast , and there’s a ward, a therapeutic feeding centre, where I met a couple of them. One was a little girl, she was so painfully thin, she was weighing just five kilograms, and she’s a year and ten months old. Her normal body weight should be about 10-15 kilograms so that shows how tiny she is. And her mother told me that she was already quite bad back at home in Ivory Coast, but the whole experience of being in the forest with no food just made the situation far worse. So those are some of the human stories that I’ve been hearing. Today Oxfam put out a press release. We’re really worried that the approaching rains are going to make it really difficult to get aid to communities, to refugees, thousands of whom are not in any camps or transit centres, but still in border villages where it’s quite difficult to get aid right now, but with the approaching rains it’s going to be almost impossible to get aid to them. Our press release is called ‘the clock is ticking to help refugees’ and you can read it on our website which is www.oxfam.org.uk. And we’re basically warning that there’s a limited opportunity to get aid, to get help to these people before the rainy season. I have to say, last night again there was very heavy rain and this just makes it almost impossible for the trucks to go down heavily forested roads, they’re not even roads, they’re dirt tracks, and they’re heavily pitted now with lots of holes . As I said in my podcast yesterday, one truck that we’ve been trying to get into the village where we’ve been working, bringing in water, actually overturned one day, so that illustrates how hard the problem’s going to be, and unless people move from these border areas into larger areas, centres where we can get help to them effectively and easily, they risk being cut off from help altogether when the rainy season approaches. I think the next few days are going to be critical. We don’t know what is going to happen, we hear there’s heavy fighting in the most populous area, Abidjan, now for control for power. But meanwhile thousands of people are still arriving here in Liberia every day. They’re sick in many cases, they need help – they don’t have clothing, they don’t have food, they need shelter. These are the immediate needs, and these are needs that we hope to address in the next few days and weeks. This is Caroline Gluck for Oxfam, saying goodbye.

This is Caroline Gluck Oxfam Humanitarian Press Officer. I'm currently in Grand Guedeh which is where many thousands of refugees have fled escaping conflict in the Ivory Coast or Cote D'Ivoire. Today I went to a town right on the border it's about 6 kilometers from the border called Bawadei(?) where more than 2000 refugees have took shelter with the host community. The arrivals have actually effectively more than doubled a community and put real strain on people living there. People are mainly subsistence farmers but they've opened up their homes and their hearts to these new arrivals. They've allowed them to stay in their houses and they've given them food and in some case also clothing because many simply fled their villages when the fighting started and walked across to Liberia, a journey that took them 4 even 5 days. So they're quite traumatised. They've got nothing with them, no shelter, no food. But now there are so many people in the community it's putting a huge strain on them. Food stocks are running out... In that village there are three water pumps but only one is effectively working. So Oxfam today, managed to get water supplies into the community and we've connected it to taps so that people can have water for cleaning and for drinking. We're also looking at installing latrines because people are defecating outside at the moment. But one real problem is actually getting help to the border villages where most of the estimated 100,000 plus refugees from Cote D'Ivoire or Ivory Coast have come into Liberia. Most are staying with host communities in border villages. There’s only one established camp, set up by UNHCR and something like 2,500 people are living there at the moment so a very small number of people in areas further away from the border where help can be got more effectively and quickly. And to illustrate a point, we tried to truck water to the village of Bawadei(?) yesterday and it had rained very heavily the night before. As a result the truck overturned and we had to abort the mission because we simply couldn’t get through the road. So this problem is going to increase as the weeks go by because the rainy season is going to start in earnest in April so the clock is ticking and we need to get help to people who really need it urgently now. I met one family today in Bawadei (?) whose story really struck me. It’s a family with six children and the adults and they’ve spent days travelling by foot from their village to get through Ivory Coast. And they told me on the fourth day they had to cross the river with a very fast flowing current with about 30 people and two of them were daughters of this woman’s sister who escaped the fighting but got separated. And unfortunately these two children lost their footing on a tree truck that they had to cross over the river and they lost their lives. They drowned and the current was so strong that nobody could rescue them. And the family is still very traumatised by this. They’re now living with a family in Bawadei (?), but said there are 22 other people sharing the same room, there’s not much room, there’s not much food, they’re very grateful for the help they’ve got, but they’re actually quite concerned about the strain it’s putting on the family that’s helping them.So these are some of the stories that I’ve been hearing from people that have come across. Many have been separated, there are mothers with young children who aren’t with their husbands because they fled the fighting when rebels came to their village… They just simply got up and ran and lost their relatives and their loved ones. I met two children yesterday, the family had fled, but the girl had polio and the brother had been working as an apprentice mechanic. When he came home she was the only one at home and he helped her, and in some cases he had to carry her through the bush, until they could get to safety. They’re very touching stories. At the moment the communities and the people are very patient but they say their main needs now are shelter. They don’t have enough shelter, they’re running out of food, they don’t have good supplies of water and they need clothing as well. They need help and they need it now. More people are coming as refugees into Liberia everyday as fighting intensifies in Ivory Coast. This is Caroline Gluck in Grand Guedeh having just come back from the border town of Bawadei (?) signing off.

Hello this is Louis Belanger Oxfam Media officer based on New York reporting on the on going crisis on Sri Lanka which have been affected by massive flooding in the last couple weeks. So 10000 of people are affected over a million people in fact and Oxfam is particularly concerned with this situation for 325000 of those people who have been displaced and are now homeless. Now there's been some some positive news in in the last few hours where some of one of the main road so the road between Columbo to Capital which is in south west part of the country to Baticalwa(?) which is in the east part has reopened so that road has been

Oxfam Public Health Promotor Qasim Barech reports from the Swat Valley in Pakistan. It is the worst flood in the history of Pakistan. The total population of Swat district is 1.7 million, out of 1.7 million, 45% are badly affected due to this recent flood. At the moment the greatest need for the affected families is clean drinking water… like I can say 95% drinking water sources have been heavily contaminated due to this recent flood. Second thing is sanitation facilities like toilets, especially for women. Families are also needing tool kits for those families whose houses are totally damaged to rebuild or to start the basic construction of their houses here in Swat valley. Oxfam and our implementing partner are the only organisations now on the ground providing support to affected families where accessibility is possible in Swat valley. At the moment we have covered almost 50,000 individuals and we have been regularly providing clean drinking water to water tankers to them and we’ve also provided pure sachets for water purification and a quick rehabilitation of water supplies has been started. And Oxfam buckets distribution has been already started on the ground. And besides this, our partner’s female public health promoter has been started extensive hygiene promotion campaign in affected area of Swat Valley to be awareness to the flood affected families about, regarding the public health promotion. Due to accessibility problems, all humanitarian organisations, including Oxfam has been facing the problem to provide humanitarian assistance to these affected area. Because upper Swat is totally cut off from the whole country, and kilometres of roads and bridges are completely washed away. We are planning, the areas that are not accessible at the moment, to rebuild their water supplies and to install water tanks over there, so we are planning to distribute bottled water to the affected families in upper Swat area. So this is our plan for tomorrow. Team is here, we are discussing now the solution for this. We have just received like 20, uh 25 hundred hygiene kits and household kits and food which we just received and it’s also gone to distribute tomorrow in affected area. I’m going to request that all humanitarian organisations, and individuals from all over the world, to join their hands and contribute to these flood emergency response.

Louis Belanger, Oxfam spokesperson, reporting briefly on the earthquake that has just struck Chile in South America. It looks like the important earthquake in the centre of the country. So Oxfam has already sent a team of engineers and logisticians to Chile, to the country, and have our best people flying in from Colombia and Mexico which is our regional headquarters in Latin America. We are already in touch with partner organisations, so Chilean organisations, to be able to assess the situation as quickly as possible, so that we can get started as quickly as possible when our engineers and logisticians get there. Now, the severity of the earthquake is still unknown at the moment, but as always, in Oxfam, we are preparing for the worst. It seems that the government is responding to the earthquake already. Its response was very fast. That's good news. Chile is a developed country and it's very capable to respond to this. Oxfam wants to be in place to help as soon as possible so that's why we have sent our team and why we have already contacted our partner organisations in country. So that's the update that we have for now. Stay tuned for more info as soon as we get there. Thank you.