40 results for author: Sasha Kramer

On our way home?

This is the day.  Bobo and I are in the final stretch of preparing for his long awaited voyage home to Haiti.  Today at 3 pm Bobo will be on a plane to Nigeria and then on to Ghana from there to JFK and then back home to Haiti by noon tomorrow if all goes according to plan. It has been a wild week with allsorts of twists and turns in the plans.  In the end we were honored and amazed that National Geographic came to our rescue.  We should have known all along to reach out to them, given that they are such a reputable organization and that they were the official sponsors of our work here.  I think we were just feeling so lost and dismayed during ...

Bobo is Out of the Hospital but Not Out of the Woods

To our dear friends and supporters, We are in awe of the outpouring of support that we have received from people around the world who have been holding Bobo in their hearts over the past week.  It is now midnight in Benin but I wanted to take a moment to update everyone on this ever evolving nightmare. First the good news, and it is very good…Bobo was released from the hospital today and is now resting at a lovely German guesthouse.  His platelet levels are still low and he will be taking medication for the next few weeks to ensre that the parasites are completely out of his system.  Bobo was diagnosed with falciporum malaria with a parasire ...

SOIL Returns to Its Roots

SOIL Explores the World’s Largest EcoSan Project and Reunites with Heroes Co-written by Sasha Kramer and Anthony Kilbride See all the photos from South Africa on SOIL's Flickr page. Sasha: SOIL Returns to It's Roots Seven years ago, in a country more than 7000 miles from Haiti the seeds that would later become SOIL were carefully collected. I had first visited South Africa in 2005 before starting SOIL and it was that visit that inspired my passion for ecological sanitation.  During that first visit I attended an ecological sanitation conference in Durban where I had the honor of meeting some of the leaders in the field of converting waste into ...

Help Bobo Get Home

Today is Haitian Flag day and as Haitian's everywhere celebrate their proud history, SOIL's sanitation director, Baudeler Magloire ("Bobo"), is stuck in an airport in Morocco. PLEASE HELP HIM GET HOME TO HAITI - DONATE USING THE FORM ON THE RIGHT Many of you who have been following SOIL's recent blog posts about Africa know that, thanks to a grant from National Geographic, SOIL has spent the past 3 weeks working in collaboration with several women's group in northern Benin.  The most amazing part of this trip was that Bobo was able to travel to Benin to share his experience in Haiti in the country of his ancestors.  Bobo was responsible for all ...

May 2012 Newsletter: South Africa, Haiti, Sanitation and Friends

Dear friends of SOIL, I am writing to you from South Africa where I have been exchanging ideas with Durban's municipal authority who are currently operating the world's largest ecological sanitation project. I have learned so much from this exchange and am so grateful to all of the organizations, individuals and government representatives who have warmly received us. I have also been deeply inspired by the realization that, though there are many laudable projects happening throughout the world, SOIL's work remains at the cutting edge of the field. Our emergency sanitation projects uniquely provide a safe and ecological option to displaced communiti...

Back Into the Toilet

This is one story from a multi-part series on SOIL's adventures in Africa. Our wonderful adventures in the depths of abandoned pit latrines continued this week with yet another descent into the old school latrine in Kalale Benin. Our small SOIL team of myself, Baudeler (Bobo) Magloire and Anthony Kilbride, came to Benin one week ago to collaborate with a local organization ADESCA by sharing our ecological sanitation experience in Haiti in an effort to help make women’s community gardens in several rural communities more profitable.  For the past several years these women have been working with ADESCA and their international partner SELF to ...

SOIL in Africa Part 2: Into the Toilet

This is one story from a multi-part series on SOIL's adventures in Africa. Today we had one of the highlights of our professional careers, or at least it was one of my finest hours.  In an attempt to demonstrate the possibility of converting human waste into compost the SOIL team, together with our hosts ADESCA, paid a visit to the local primary school.  But this was not your usual school visit.  We were looking for proof that human wastes can be transformed into soil, and what better place to find that proof than deep in the ground in an old latrine.  Because the conversion of poop to soil can take at least a year, and we are only here in Benin ...

SOIL in Africa!

This is one story from a multi-part series on SOIL's adventures in Africa. For the next 3 weeks a SOIL team will be working in Benin, learning more about the culture here and constructing the first of 3 ecological toilets in a rural area in the northern region of Kalale in collaboration with a local organization ADESCA and their international partner SELF. This trip is thanks to the Blackstone Ranch Institute which offers a challenge grant for the most innovative new projects proposed by two or more National Geographic Emerging Explorers. This year the grant went to Sasha Kramer of SOIL, Jennifer Burney who works with SELF on solar powered irriga...

San Francisco joins the composting toilet revolution!

SOIL was co-founded in 2006 in San Francisco California.   We are so pleased to see that our dream has come full circle with San Francisco now considering putting in a network of public composting toilets throughout the city to help solve the sewage and water problems faced by large cities around the world. A recent film about SOIL called Holy Crap ends with one of our favorite Haitian collaborators, Daniel Tillias of Pax Christi Haiti, saying "with this composting toilet program, Haiti will once again be an example to the world, just as we have been in the past". We are proud to serve as an example to one of our favorite cities in the world, SOIL's ...

SAKALA Field trip to Compost Site

  Last Sunday 12 young women from Cite Soleil visited the SOIL compost site in Pernier.  The young women were from a local organization called SAKALA (supported by Pax Christi Haiti) which works on community development and conflict prevention in Cite Soleil.  SOIL has been working with SAKALA for the past 2 years on ecological sanitation and we currently have 20 toilets in the Cite Lumiere neighborhood of Cite Soleil where SAKALA is active.   SAKALA has recently started an amazing community garden called Tap Tap Garden with the support of Bochika, a Florida based organization that works closely with SOIL.  Given their experience ...