Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, you can pretty much expect to find Akiko Mera in the second-floor Oxfam office in a gray, nondescript building in Ueno, Tokyo, surrounded by a half-dozen desks piled high with papers, pamphlets and books. It looks very much like many other decades-old offices, where the daily grind of chores seems to have seeped into the surroundings.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, Mera's day involves your run-of-the-mill office chores: meetings with staff members, presentations and the checking of e-mails. But despite the seeming drabness, she and her colleagues bring to their modest chamber a certain lightness — a product of their continual efforts to brighten the lives of less fortunate people abroad.

"We do emergency work funding Darfur, we work with people in South Africa who have HIV/AIDS, we have a Mozambique livelihoods program, we do livelihood and disaster management in Cambodia, ethnic minority and livelihood work in India, and we do disaster management advocacy work in the Philippines," says Mera, who joined Oxfam Japan as a communications officer in 2005, two years after the organization was officially registered here as an NPO.