SOIL Celebrates the Arrival of the New Poopmobile

Dear friends,

At dawn on Monday morning, Clotes, SOIL’s Poopmobile driver, will be pulling out of the SOIL’s Port-au-Prince office gates in a new Poopmobile to do the biweekly toilet drum pickup in tent camps around the capital. The 5,000 people living in tent cities who currently count on SOIL’s sanitation services to keep their emergency toilets clean and well-functionging will now rest assured that waste collection and treatment will continue, uninterrupted. And all the millions of other errands that the Poopmobile goes on between the toilet drum pickups – delivering EcoSan compost, picking up organic matter for the composting waste treatment process, purchasing supplies, etc – will be back up and going.

We call this photo “Dodo’s Miracle”. This is what the SOIL pickup looked like last week while delivering extra clean, empty drums back to the public toilets so that they could stay open during the Poopmobile crisis.

SOIL’s resident mechanic, Dodo, plans to work over the weekend modifying the back of Poopmobile II to make it work well for the drum pickup service to resume on Monday. And this morning Dodo excitedly announced that because Poomobile II is longer than Poopmobile I, we’ll now be able to pick up 60 drums (900 gallons in total!) instead of 40 drums in each trip. This means that we’ll significantly save on gas and staff time.

SOIL’s EcoSan toilets already are one of the most cost-effective sanitation services in Haiti (including overhead, staff costs, and logistics, SOIL’s emergency public toilets in the tent camps cost less than $1.50 per person per month!). And this calculation doesn’t even factor in that SOIL provides toilets and waste treatment services (compared to many sanitation providers that only provide toilets and waste “dumping”) and that income from compost sales subsidizes our operation costs!

Dodo happily inspects Poomobile II

We’re looking forward to doing the calculations to see how Poopmobile II helps us continue to bring down our expenses and set a pathway for the national expansion of affordable, ecological sanitation services in Haiti.

We also are starting to daydream about how we’re going to paint Poopmobile II…

But these are projects for the future… for now we just want to say thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We are so grateful to our dear friends around the world who came together and, in one short week, made sure that SOIL’s emergency sanitation programs will continue strongly into the future.

Thank you! Mèsi anpil! We did it! SOIL has a new Poopmobile!

With love from Haiti,
SOIL

Thank you! We love the new SOIL Poopmobile!