Clean water beats social justice

In the early 1980s when I was a schoolboy, my father, Brian Hartley, worked for Oxfam during a famine in Uganda’s Kara-moja. Like Dad, the other Oxfam people I remember in East Africa were earnest agriculturalists or engineers who had been overseas most of their lives. Some of them were religious or socialist, but they all had the technical skills to help local farmers rebuild their lives after wars or droughts.

The focus was on development. Like my dad, most were sandal-clad volunteers who worked for the charity for free. They helped farmers cultivate better crops or breed improved livestock to stop soil erosion, vaccinate cattle, plant trees and dig boreholes.

Since Quakers founded Oxfam in the 1940s to help civilians in Greece, it has saved and improved countless lives. I admired the charity so much that while at university I would secretly (because I feared my fellow undergraduates might laugh at me) visit its headquarters in north Oxford to do odd jobs.