Get to Know Sergo
Here’s Sergo getting a day of collection started in the Avyasyon neighborhood in 2015!
“Chanje etap, pran ti tap pou w ka rive – to take it to another level, you have to start taking steps” says Sergo, in a conversation we shared about his work with SOIL, our future goals, and our hopes for future generations in the country we all love so deeply.
Iranye Fleurant, better known as Sergo, has worked with SOIL since 2006 when our work was just getting off the ground. Sergo was invited by SOIL’s Cap-Haïtien Regional Manager Romel to attend a training session and shortly after, he joined the team! When SOIL began expanding our urban household sanitation service, EkoLakay, Sergo moved from his role as a public toilet manager to a weekly waste collector.
SOIL’s collection service crew members work hard day-in and day-out to keep the service rolling. “When I arrive, I put on my uniform and then we make sure the [3-wheeled EkoLakay motorcycle] is filled with containers of cover material,” Sergo shared. “Then we head out to do the collection route where we collect full containers from the customers and give them empty containers and a [new] container of cover material. I am also in charge of the two wheelbarrows in [Cap-Haïtien neighborhood of] Shada – I bring them to be repaired and if we need a new one I am the person who tells the welder how to make it.”
Sergo is well known and respected in his community, and he enjoys teaching anybody who will listen about how unsafe approaches to disposing waste ends up contaminating the environment and water sources, spreading deadly disease. Thanks to his hard work and dedication to his community, we have had many families sign up for SOIL’s lifesaving sanitation services based on his recommendation alone. Not only has Sergo recruited customers, but also other SOIL employees!
“SOIL doesn’t install latrines because there are a lot of people who have wells and they can contaminate the water. The toilets SOIL provides don’t let the poop get into the ground to spread, [and] the sanitation [work] that SOIL is doing in the streets is helping people a lot,” Sergo told us. We are honored to work alongside sanitation heroes like Sergo in the struggle to ensure every family in Haiti has access to safely managed sanitation and that the environment is restored to its life-giving potential. Thank you, Sergo!
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Dana Visalli
March 13, 2020 (12:42 am)
Just a thank you to Sergo for Haiti and for the human family, helping us wake up to ecological reality–for his many years of good work.
I did tell my local ‘Schoolyard Garden’ here in Washington State that I would build them a composting toilet, all they have to do is ask. At the moment they have a ‘chemical toilet’ outside the garden, which contradicts all the education inside the garden.