67 results for tag: Cap Haitien
Understanding Why Families Join SOIL’s Sanitation Service
SOIL provides employment in Haiti’s sanitation sector to more than 70 people, but beyond that, we strive to provide employment and internship opportunities whenever possible. Recently, SOIL hired 15 university students from various academic backgrounds in northern Haiti to assist with a study we are conducting to better understand why people join and remain a part of SOIL’s EkoLakay sanitation service. Background on the Research The 26-day long study took place in Cap-Haitïen alongside our partners at OPEPA, the Haitian Government’s local water and sanitation authority in the northern region, and researchers at the University of Oregon, ...
Meet Djimitri, SOIL’s New Operations Director
As SOIL continues to grow, so does our team! SOIL recently created a new position for an Operations Director in Cap-Haitien, Haiti. This new role is critical to our efforts to expand SOIL’s reach and will work with the senior management team in Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haitien to guide SOIL’s performance and growth. Djimitri Celestin was selected for this position, which starts mid-November, and we are delighted to welcome him to the SOIL team. Djimitri has a background in
industrial engineering and supply chain management and will be a huge asset to
SOIL as we scale up our services in Cap-Haitien. His responsibilities will also
include ...
Meet Tidou
Lucny Joasil, better known to everybody as Tidou, has been
connected to SOIL for more than a decade. He first met SOIL Co-Founder and
Executive Director Sasha Kramer in 2008 when SOIL was looking to hire Haitian
Creole-English teachers and translators. That was Tidou’s initial role with
SOIL and over the years he has moved into new positions with our team, each
time taking on more and more responsibility. Now, he’s the Assistant Composting
Supervisor at SOIL’s waste treatment site outside of Cap-Haïtien. Reporting directly to SOIL’s Composting Supervisor Job Etienne, Tidou helps collect data, supervises composting activities, oversees ...
All Together to Make it Happen
Nadege Fucien is a mother and an entrepreneur. She is raising her growing family alongside Haiti’s northern coast in a neighborhood of Cap-Haïtien called Avyasyon. Like many of her neighbors, Nadege joined SOIL’s sanitation service, EkoLakay, to have a safe, clean place for her family to go to the bathroom. During our weekly EkoLakay collection run last week, our team took a break to sit and chat together to get to know her a little more. Meet Nadege One of the reasons that Nadege decided first to sign up to have a SOIL toilet in her home was the affordability of the service. Compared to other available sanitation solutions, SOIL’s was ...
All Under One Roof
We’re moving! Since 2013, SOIL’s Cap-Haïtien team has operated out of an office we built from the ground up on a beautiful piece of land just down the road from our composting waste treatment facilities. Over the past six years, this space has served as a wonderful home for SOIL’s work as we have implemented and refined our ecological sanitation service EkoLakay. Here's where SOIL's teams have been working in northern Haiti since 2013 Now, as we embark on a journey to expand the reach of EkoLakay, SOIL came to realize that it was time to say goodbye to our office in Limonade. Why? We determined that moving offices would allow us to ...
Taking a Ride with SOIL’s Sanitation Heroes
Happy new year to SOIL supporters near and far! As we all settle into the new year, I have been reflecting on 2018 and some of the moments that most inspired me. One experience pops immediately to mind, and I wanted to share it as a reminder of the importance of all that goes on behind the scenes at SOIL that makes this work possible. As the years have gone by and my roles and responsibilities have shifted, I find I have less and less time to spend in the field. In the last months of 2018, I was honored to be able to take the time to accompany our EkoLakay collectors on their early morning collection runs in several of the neighborhoods we work ...
SOIL Completes Composting Site Expansion Project in Northern Haiti
Photo: Vic Hinterlang
Late last year we shared some pretty exciting news with you all. After nearly doubling the amount of waste SOIL had been treating at our Northern Haiti composting site, we broke ground on a significant infrastructure expansion project to enable SOIL to more efficiently treat waste and to prepare our site for the continued growth of EkoLakay’s sanitation service. We’ve been hard at work to make these improvements and now have even bigger news to share – it’s complete! What Have We Built? Compost Batch Processing Unit SOIL successfully completed construction on the entire compost batch processing unit ...
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 cartogra...
SOIL U
Regular readers of the SOIL blog will know that in November our amazing weather station in Limonade went live, and that since that time, it has been sharing the local weather data with the world. Rainfall, temperature, wind direction and speed, pressure… it’s all there for anyone to access! Last month, the University of Limonade requested a tour of our waste treatment site so they could see the weather station and hear about how it works and what we do with the data. They were also interested in using the data in their own curriculum, as an educational tool, because weather data in Haiti can be quite difficult to obtain. Ultimately there ...
Disinfecting Urine and Being “Claire Twa”
Hello! My name is Claire or, as I was known around the office, “Claire Twa” (meaning Claire Three), since there were two other women named Claire working there at the time. I am a Master of Public Health student in Environmental Health at Emory University, and I worked with SOIL this summer to study various inexpensive and easy ways to disinfect urine before disposal. I tested the addition of different levels of ashes, vinegar, and Clorox since these three materials are accessible and inexpensive. SOIL’s style of Ecological Sanitation (the safe re-use of the nutrients in human waste) utilizes a urine diversion toilet which separates the ...