Sean Kenny, Senior media officer

For the past fortnight my professional life has focussed on the emergency in Haiti, but my imagination has concentrated on another part of the Caribbean: the island of Trinidad, the setting for VS Naipaul’s classic novel “A House for Mr Biswas”.

Mr Biswas (his first name, Mohun, is barely used) is born into great poverty, the son of an indentured labourer who came from India to work on the sugarcane plantations. Mr Biswas accidentally marries into a large, wealthy but squalid landowning family, the Tulsis, who see in him another son-in-law who can work on the family’s estates.

Early 20th century Trinidad is poor, and Naipaul’s men and women live narrow, constrained lives. Even in this milieu the Tulsis are quite awful. Their house is dirty, the food bad, the family run as a dictatorship by the sickly Mrs Tulsi and her brother-in-law Seth. They marry off the girl children without a care for happiness or compatibility. These girls grow into mothers who boast how hard they beat their children, whilst the husbands work away on the estates, looking forward to Friday night in the rumshop. The capital Port of Spain, only a few hours distant, is another world.

Mr Biswas rebels against all this. He rails against his in-laws and offends their traditional Hindu sensibility. Accidentally literate, he reads cheap detective novels and Marcus Aurelius. He escapes the sugarcane fields and the rice paddies and moves to the big city, where he becomes a journalist on the Trinidad Sentinel. And most importantly he attempts – several times - to build his own house.

Mr Biswas is a fool but he is a modern man trying, and failing, to assert himself in the face of poverty and narrow-mindedness. As Mr Biswas gets older we see Trinidad start to open out. The extended Tulsi clan disintegrates into nuclear families, and they discover personal ambition and a thirst for education. Mr Biswas’ children go abroad on scholarships and Mr Biswas himself finally buys a house.

“A House for Mr Biswas” is a personal book, not a political one, however we see a country taking its first steps in independence and attempting to drag itself out of poverty, and what this means for the men and women caught up in these changes.

Modern Trinidad and Tobago is not a desperately poor country – only 4% of its population lives below the poverty line, and over 70% of the population own a phone. Mr Biswas’ wife Shama is barely literate but today virtually all the island’s girls and boys can read and write. Things have moved on.

Hearing the terrible stories from Haiti, and other impoverished nations, sometimes it’s easy to feel that nothing ever changes. Thinking about the life of Mr Biswas – journalist, joker, house-builder – dispels that feeling.

Jane Moyo, Head of media relations

This morning the Guardian reported that the Catholic diocese of Miami has asked for permission to fly out of Haiti children orphaned by the earthquake. If the US government agrees, it seems they’ll be housed in four temporary orphanages in Florida before being rehomed with American foster families or even housed with extended family members in the US if they can be found.

Part of me says yes. The Guardian reports that the American-Haitian community is very supportive of the idea. But it's a very complex issue and I feel conflicted about it.

Every child has the right to be loved and to be kept safe and well. But despite the cataclysmic events that have been unfolding over the past week, in the first instance, there should be urgent efforts to set up proper facilities in safer parts of Haiti to care for and look after any child that is found without parents.

If it turns out that it is currently too difficult to find a secure environment then evacuate children to where they are safe, but we should never shut the door on their eventual return to surviving family members in Haiti.

It is vitally important not to leave any stone unturned when trying to trace families. Only after exhaustive efforts should children be considered for permanent adoption in other countries. And even then, strict safeguards must be put in place to ensure a child's safety.

After all, it’s very rare for a child to be totally alone in the world, especially in Haiti where community and family links are so strong.

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Jane Moyo, Head of media relations

I woke this morning to the BBC's Today programme, news of the terrible earthquake in Haiti and a phone call from Sky asking for an update on our efforts. Logging on, I saw that our Latin American Director Adriano Campolina had been trying to get through to our Haiti team all night with little success. However, since then we've heard from all the team apart from three. Thank goodness for small mercies.

As Adriano explained to Sky, Haiti finds it difficult to cope in the best of times. The capital Port au Prince is ramshackle and down-at-heel with many living in dire poverty. Now that there's an earthquake I suspect it will be hell on earth. Certainly it sounds like it from the descriptions that are filtering out.

Earthquakes throw up very particular sets of needs. There will be lots of survivors with trauma injuries - fractures and lacerations caused by falling buildings. There will also be people suffering from psychological trauma - the guilt of the survivor but also an overwhelming grief at the loss of loved ones and concern over the loss of possessions - if everything you have has been destroyed, how do you cope?

Within the relief effort itself, search and rescue will take precedence for the first couple of days as will providing shelter, food and clean water with the latter continuing for many months to come. And all of that needs to be organised and co-ordinated. That's incredibly important in an emergency. But with thousands presumed dead or injured and so much destroyed - including the UN building with UN officials missing - even that's going to be a struggle.

In the meantime, Adriano and a team of experts from our Brazil office have managed to hitch a lift on a military aircraft and hope to arrive this evening to boost the efforts of our local staff. Our thoughts are with them and the men, women and children they work with.

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Sean Kenny, Senior media officer

I felt sorry for the station controller last night as he explained to a group of cold, weary commuters why our train home had yet to appear. Something to do with snow on an incline further up the track, apparently.

“Third World transport system,” a man muttered, turning away and burrowing into his hood.

It’s a charge I’ve thrown around myself when my plans have been disrupted by Britain’s ramshackle transport network, which always seems to buckle in weather that would barely raise eyebrows in Sweden. And I’m sure it passed a few lips amongst the drivers who endured a miserable night stranded on the A3 in Hampshire.

Of course events like that are really horrible. But how do they compare to the daily chore of getting around in the developing world? In Mumbai, a city whose population is the same size as Australia’s, commuters running late don’t just forgo a seat, they forgo a place in the carriage itself. Author Suketu Mehta wrote:

“If you are late for work in [Mumbai], and reach the station just as the train is leaving the platform, you can run up to the packed compartments and you will find many hands stretching out to grab you on board, unfolding outward from the train like petals. As you run alongside you will be picked up, and some tiny space will be made for your feet on the edge of the open doorway.”

Cars might give travellers some personal space, but they won’t necessarily arrive on time, as this superb article about a typical day in Nigerian traffic by the New Yorker journalist Steve Coll makes clear:

“I had four interview appointments yesterday in Lagos. The first one was scheduled for 10 am at a place I knew to be about a thirty-minute drive from my hotel, without accounting for traffic. I was not surprised, however, when my Nigerian colleague suggested that we set out about 7:30 am, just to be safe. The traffic here is legendary.”

It’s not just Lagos. Think Delhi, Bangkok, Tehran: extraordinary traffic jams snarl the streets of most developing world cities, slowing down business, filling the air with fumes and crushing residents’ private lives. So if getting home tonight takes me two hours instead of one I’ll try to console myself with the thought that it’s the exception, rather than the rule.

Jane Moyo, Head of media relations

Discussions around international aid - does it/doesn't it work? - continue and both sides of the debate are dealt with on the website Open Democracy. It goes without saying that ActionAid is on the side that believes lives can be transformed through the positive impact of aid and that Britain's contribution through government-to-government aid and charitable giving is something to celebrate not denigrate.

So if this belief sits firmly within ActionAid's DNA, why is the news blog addressing aid? It's because this morning I read two emails sent by ActionAid London colleagues but with a genesis in Ethiopia. The first urged me to read the Open Democracy blog by Addis Ababa-based Owen Barder that dissects the different strands of the aid debate. I was particularly struck by an analogy Owen made with health spending in Britain where he said:

"It is intellectually lazy to side-step proper analysis by observing that many developing countries remain poor despite having received billions of dollars of aid over many decades. That does not tell us whether aid to those countries has made matters better or worse than would have been the case without it.

"Britain spends about one hundred times as much on health care each year as it does on aid to Africa, but people in Britain still get sick. Does that mean that health spending doesn’t work? Perhaps doctors are actually making us ill? More likely, we would have even bigger health problems without all that spending."

I then opened an email forwarded from ActionAid Ethiopia about the troubles being experienced by one of my colleagues there. Genet has worked for ActionAid for over 20 years. A single mother of four, she is considered a mother by her colleagues both for her long service and her character – winning the love and respect of all the staff.

Genet has lost both kidneys to a chronic illness and ActionAid’s country director in Ethiopia is now finalizing the process for a kidney transplant – a procedure that cannot take place in the country. ActionAid Ethiopia staff have between them raised US$34,000 to send Genet to India for the operation but it’s not enough and the call has gone out to the international ActionAid family to donate. I know it will happen, enough will be raised and Genet's life should be saved.

What’s the link between Owen’s article and Genet’s predicament apart from Ethiopia? For me it was the realization that despite being a professional woman, even Genet cannot get the medical services she needs without her colleagues, friends and family having to chip in. How much more difficult would it be if she were living in poverty in a rural village or an urban slum? Frankly she would die.

It's important that we all show solidarity with those living in poverty in the developing world. This is not just about donating money – crucial though that is – it's also about giving our time and commitment by joining campaigns for change.

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Asha  Tharoor, Senior media officer (policy and campaigns)

Two 10 year-old girls from a school in Walthamstow have just won the second Steve Sinnott Award for Young Global Campaigners of The Year. Ronan McKenzie and Rhiannon Kruse-Edwards - or R&R as they were referred to in The Guardian - may sound like a comedy double act or aspiring pop duo but are two passionate young students inspired to raise awareness of the 2015 Millennium Development Goal that all children in the world have a right to primary education.

The award was set up in memory of the late general secretary of the National Union of Teachers who had been a passionate advocate of the Global Campaign for Education, made up of charities, including ActionAid and teaching unions.

Ronan and Rhaiannon were, as we all should be, horrified to learn that 75 million children are still not getting an education, with the world's poorest missing out the most. Unsurprisingly, 60% of these children are girls who suffer the most from a lack of education  -  usually overlooked in favour of boys in large families. Being locked out of education is often the beginning of a lifetime of struggle.

Education for all is set to be in the spotlight throughout 2010 with the FIFA World Cup backing campaigns like One Goal which aims to leave a legacy of education not poverty in South Africa and across the continent after one of the biggest global sporting events has come to town.