SOIL’s EkoLakay Service Mapped in New Water Atlas

Hot off the press is Guerilla Cartography’s Water Atlas, their latest project featuring volunteer submissions of maps on all things water, including one titled “Reducing Water Pollution with a Poop Solution” – a map on SOIL’s EkoLakay household sanitation service!

Monika Roy, SOIL’s former Project Coordinator, spearheaded this project back in 2015 when Guerilla Cartography started soliciting map submissions for the atlas. At the time, SOIL had just begun to incorporate more GPS data into our collection service to determine the best locations for storage depots and service routes.

Guerilla Cartography offered to pair up new cartographers with seasoned pros, and Monika took the opportunity to partner with professional Chris Dunn, who was able to listen to Monika’s ideas, bounce some ideas back, and work his skills into the final piece.

The map displays EkoLakay toilet locations for one of Haiti’s most vulnerable communities, Shada II, located in the northern city of Cap-Haitian. Residents in this neighborhood have been some of EkoLakay’s most longstanding users, choosing to pay a low monthly fee for SOIL’s weekly collection service where no other municipal sanitation options exist.

Shada II is also located at the bottom of the watershed and at the mouth of the Cap-Haitian bay, a place where just an inch of rain in the region funnels thousands of gallons of water through the neighborhood, flooding houses on a seasonal basis. These flood zones are overlaid onto the map.

SOIL started working in Shada II because of the tremendous sanitation needs. Since the EkoLakay toilets are easily movable, clients can move their toilet to a stairwell, roof,  or 2^nd story when it rains, preventing untreated human waste from contaminating flood waters. Instead, this waste is safely treated and transformed into nutrient rich compost at SOIL’s composting site.

The map can be viewed in the eBook version here, or you can purchase a hard copy version here.

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