Catalyst: Empowered by Poop: Invigorating Soil and Livelihood in Haiti
By Rasha Shihabi, Catalyst, November 7, 2011 A special project lead by SOIL (Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihood) attempts to use a new type of public toilets to address Haiti’s devastating sanitation issues. SOIL hopes that not only will their efforts address the country’s sanitation crisis, but will also provide the people of Haiti with the means to revitalize their farmland, limit the spread of disease and aid in the creation of jobs. This resourceful project has been using a strategically design sanitation system reliant on...
read moreNational Geographic: Human Waste to Revive Haitian Farmland?
By Christine Dell’Amore, National Geographic News, October 26, 2011 A new type of public toilet is helping people in Haiti make fertilizer from human waste, a project that may someday revive the country’s degraded farmland, curb disease, and create jobs. Since 2006 the U.S. nonprofit Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL) has been installing public toilets in Haiti, where 80 percent of the population has no access to sanitation. Most Haitians are forced to dispose of their waste in waterways, plastic bags, or even...
read moreStanford Magazine: Cleaner and Greener
By Theresa Johnston, Stanford Magazine, September/October 2011 How poor is Haiti? Picture a country of more than 10 million people without a single sewage treatment plant. The closest thing they have is an open unlined pit at the Port-au-Prince city dump. Each day about 50 tanker trucks pull up to the stinking crater, ditch their loads of human excrement and drive away. Traveling in Haiti as a doctoral student, Sasha Kramer found the sanitation so appalling that she considered abandoning her Stanford ecology studies to focus on development...
read moreLA Times: Haiti again caught in cholera’s grip
By Allyn Gaestel, Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2011 Reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti — Instead of the commuters typically packed into the bright blue and red “tap tap” pickup truck weaving through Haiti’s capital, a man, shrunken, dehydrated, dressed in a diaper and attached to an IV, lay on the floor. As the ad-hoc ambulance in Port-au-Prince attested, cholera refuses to leave the country. The bacterial disease that ravaged Haiti last fall had spread quickly to all regions, but calmed down in the dry spring months. With...
read moreNational Geographic: Sasha Kramer, Ecologist named an Emerging Explorer
Sasha Kramer, Ecologist, Emerging Explorer. National Geographic, 2011 “Haiti has very few resources right now. Ecological sanitation helps these marginalized, yet resilient people transform human waste into something valuable.” Sasha Kramer fights Haiti’s most pressing health, economic, and environmental problems, one toilet at a time. “When I came to Haiti with a delegation of observers after the 2004 coup, I immediately saw that the most pervasive human rights abuse was poverty and lack of access to basic services,” Kramer recalls....
read morePRI’s “The World”: Waste Not: Composting Toilets in Haiti
By Amy Bracken, PRI’s The World, June 2, 2011 The village of Truittier, on the northern edge of Port-au-Prince, has a certain charm. Pigs snort and fowl cluck amid vegetable gardens and cactus hedges lining dirt paths. But the village’s raison d’etre lies in plain sight – piles of sorted trash in almost every yard. Truittier exists because it’s next to the city dump, where residents scavenge for recyclable materials. It was never pleasant living here, but things have gotten much worse since last year’s earthquake. Truittier...
read moreHoly Crap! SOIL in Haiti (the film)
By Jennifer Benorden, June 2011 Watch the film at holycrapthefilm.com.
read moreSierra Magazine: Royal Flush
By Molly Oleson, Sierra Magazine, May/June 2011 “Even prior to the earthquake, Haiti had the worst sanitation of any country in the western hemisphere. Most people here who don’t have access to a toilet go in the bushes or in plastic bags that get thrown into abandoned lots or bodies of water. “As an ecologist, I think about the flow of nutrients through the ecosystem. Right now, humans use a very fuel-intensive process—industrial nitrogen fixation—to pull nitrogen from the atmosphere and make it into fertilizer. We spend...
read moreHuffington Post: Empowering Haiti Through Sanitation, Sasha Kramer Named “Greatest Person of the Day”
By Julia Steers, Huffington Post, January 13, 2011 Social change rarely makes for glamorous work, but Dr. Sasha Kramer’s sanitation efforts in Haiti redefine the phrase “down and dirty.” As a Stanford graduate student studying ecology, Sasha decided that upon graduation, she would go to Haiti to focus on sustainable agriculture. She followed through, making her first trip to Haiti in 2004 as a human rights observer shortly after a volatile political coup and fell in love with the country. Sasha was taken with the...
read moreBlack Looks: Toilets are a human right: From poo to compost in 6 months
By Sokari, Black Looks, January 12, 2011 I met Sasha Kramer the co-founder of SOIL [Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods] one Sunday afternoon at a Haitian family wedding party high up on the top of a hill in Pernier district of Port-au-Prince. About 20 of us piled into the flat bed truck and drove up and up at some points the road was so steep and so full of rocks and holes I feared those in the back would fall off. Sasha and her colleague Nick who were already there and later Nick would give a “best man” speech in fluent Kreyol...
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