36 results for author: Shannon Smith
Celebrating World Handwashing Day
SOIL has a history of participating in international days of recognition such as World Hand Washing Day (October 15) and World Toilet Day (November 19). Many of you have joined us in sharing your #Unselfies telling what sanitation means to you. And while these holidays come around every year, the celebration is unique each time. This year, Hand Washing Day came in the wake of Hurricane Matthew as cholera cases started to spike up yet again. Most people know that the simple habit of hand washing can prevent waterborne diseases like cholera, but it can be easy to forget to wash up before eating a snack or touching your face (I’m sure many of us ...
Severe Flooding Devastates Cap-Haitien
When the news of the approaching Hurricane Matthew started to circulate in Haiti in early October, residents of the northern city of Cap-Haitien hurriedly prepared for the worst. They were largely spared, unlike the cities in the Southwest which are still experiencing widespread devastation as a result. Tragically, while everyone’s attention was fixed on the suffering in the South, Cap-Haitien received the rain they had been expecting a month earlier. Starting on Friday, November 4th, Cap-Haitien was battered under torrential rains. Over 15 inches of rain fell from 5 to 11 pm, flooding every major street, in some cases higher than waist-deep. ...
Hurricane Matthew Relief in Southern Haiti
First of all, thank you. Thank you to so many of you who reached out to SOIL to make sure that we are ok here in Haiti; to the hundreds who have donated to our relief fundraiser; to our friends and staff here in Haiti who put all hands on deck to organize a trip down to the south to bring much needed supplies and support to those who have lost loved ones, homes, livelihoods. Your outpouring of love and support has been truly touching. We are relieved that all of our staff are all safe, but many have family in the south whose homes were destroyed. At this point, nearly 900 people are confirmed to have died during Hurricane Matthew in southern ...
Students enjoy the SOIL Oasis in Port-au-Prince
This week, we're mixing it up with a guest post by Gina Wymore, who recently reached out to SOIL to arrange a field trip for a group of students who live nearby the SOIL office. Take it away Gina! Last Wednesday, I had the pleasure of touring the SOIL organization with some students from the Have Faith Haiti Mission. As part of our summer program, students are learning about recycling, compost, gardening, and being environmentally conscious. They were intrigued that waste could be reused in a beneficial way. This meant SOIL would make for a great addition to our studies. We were warmly welcomed by Jimmy when we arrived with our ...
The Sanitation Saleswoman
Algate Joseph has been part of the SOIL team since 2012. She originally had a 1-month trial contract, which turned into years of dedicated contribution to SOIL’s mission. Because of her positive energy, tireless commitment to community engagement and education, and increased responsibility in the EkoLakay program, SOIL Cap-Haitien honored Algate as the employee of the month in January 2016! I interviewed Algate to see what drives her to work so hard to improve sanitation in her community. She doesn’t say so in the interview, but she brought in a whopping 227 new EkoLakay household toilet clients in 2015. Be sure to watch the song she composed ...
Student SOIL Advocates Build an Awareness Toilet
For the last four years, Miami Beach Senior High senior Cheldina Jean has been preparing to exhibit an Ecological Sanitation (EcoSan) toilet in a public space to call attention to the fact that over 1/3 of the world’s population does not have access to improved sanitation and nearly one billion people are without safe drinking water. Cheldina learned about Ecological Sanitation by joining the high school service club, Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods at Miami Beach Senior High, or [email protected], and she has come to appreciate the ways in which EcoSan captures the nutrients in waste while killing pathogens that - left untreated –enter fresh ...
Toilets + Soil = <3
SOIL celebrated two of our favorite holidays recently: World Toilet Day (November 19) and World Soil Day (December 5). To us, toilets and soil go together like peas in a pod. Many of you know that SOIL uses the natural processes of ecological sanitation in order to transform toilet waste into nutrient rich compost, as shown in the EcoSan Cycle graphic. Here in Haiti, we celebrated World Toilet Day as a platform to spread the word about Ecological Sanitation. We had a large crowd of over 300 people join us for an event that included DJs, government officials from the Ministry of Public Health, and a theater troupe known as Twoup Djabolo. Afte...
Don’t Take My Picture
“Don’t take my picture!” This was a phrase that I heard over and over while working on a case study video for SOIL with the New-York based filmmaker Monica Wise. Although this was Monica’s first trip to Haiti, she is both an experienced traveler and fearless behind the camera, spending hours at SOIL’s waste treatment site with a mask protecting her mouth, getting close and personal with the team while they dumped buckets of human waste. Nothing fazed her. “I can hide behind the camera. As long as I’m filming, I’m so focused on what I’m trying to capture that everything else becomes background noise.” While Monica was ...
Learning how to serve
This October, the Cap-Haitien SOIL staff participated in a three-day business training course hosted by Partners Worldwide. Two days of the training were dedicated to enhancing our management staff’s knowledge of basic business principles, such as calculating the price per unit of sale, negotiating price points, and reaching profitability. The last day was a customer service and marketing training for all of our service staff, which includes anyone who comes into contact with clients, from the receptionist to the office management to the bucket collection team. Brunel Louis, the business trainer, was a huge hit. Not only is he knowledgeable and ...
Haiti’s Young Agronomists
In this past fiscal year, SOIL hosted six interns in the agricultural department. The interns were all agriculture students at local universities who come to SOIL to fulfill their internship requirement during their last year of schooling. In SOIL's agricultural intern program, students gain practical hands-on experience in lab work, research and compost production, and then design and execute an experiment with SOIL compost for their senior thesis. We plan to host a whopping 14 new agricultural interns in 2015-2016! To better understand the potential impact of a SOIL internship, I talked to all the past interns to see what they’re up to now. ...