A Shout Out to the Explorer in All of Us

This is a special week in Washington as National Geographic celebrates the 2014 class of  Emerging Explorers.  SOIL’s work was honored in 2011 when SOIL Co-founder and Executive Director Sasha Kramer was recognized for our team’s groundbreaking work in waste transformation.

The Emerging Explorers Program acknowledges and supports uniquely gifted and inspiring young adventurers, scientists, photographers, and storytellers who are making a difference in the world early in their careers.  From the deepest oceans to the farthest realms of outer space, from valiant efforts to conserve fragile ecosystems to revolutionary human rights advocacy, from the food we eat to the waste we produce, these explorers are boldly venturing into new realms of human discovery.

Jimmy Louis exploring the microbial universe in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Following the example of National Geographic, the SOIL team would like to take this week to celebrate the explorer in all of us.  We are so proud to be part of a team that is pushing the limits of exploration, each in our own special way.  We gratefully acknowledge the work of the amazing Madame Bwa, our teacher and guide who shares her insights about the conditions faced by the communities we serve, and Jimmy Louis who is using his training in DNA extraction to help us study our smallest team members; the microbes in our compost piles.  We applaud the passion of Jean Delinoit, who is applying his experience in compost application to inspire and support local youth groups, and Romel Toussaint, who is spending 6 months exploring ecological gardening in California in order to share his newfound knowledge with Haiti’s farmers.  We are in awe of the courage of Baudeler Magloire (Bobo), our Deputy Regional Director in Port-au-Prince who travelled to Benin in 2012 as part of a National Geographic funded project to help share SOIL’s sanitation work with women’s farming collectives.

We honor the work of each and every one of our team members whose compassion, energy and dedication are allowing us to realize our dream of transformation, from the small everyday victories to revolutionizing the way the world views waste.

Bobo explores the underbelly of a toilet in Burkina Faso.