19 results for tag: development
New Clear Vision: "Hope and Remembrance"
Re-Posted from www.oursoil.org to New Clear Vision on January 22, 2013 Dear Friends, I am writing this letter at 3:53 pm on January 12, 2013. Three years ago today, Port au Prince was bustling with activity as people spilled into the streets from work and school. Mothers returned home after a long day of working under the hot sun, fathers greeted their children with tired eyes, neighbors shared warm handshakes and laughed away the day’s challenges. One hour later the city collapsed and over 300,000 of these mothers, fathers, children and neighbors were lost in an instant. Last night at the stroke of midnight the hills around our house in Port ...
Waterborne Disease Hits Close to Home
The past couple of weeks have been a new kind of learning experience for Sasha and myself, as we, along with several other people in our neighborhood, came down with Typhoid Fever. Although it hasn't been a fun or easy experience, Sasha and I count ourselves incredibly lucky and grateful to have access to medical facilities and treatment, and most especially to have a safe and comfortable place to convalesce and to call home. We are ever more aware of the precariousness of life for most people in Haiti, who often do not have access to any form of health care, and all too often do not have a home. Additionally, this experience highlights the incredi...
Send Nick to Durban!
Help us send SOIL’s Deputy Director to Durban, South Africa! Nick Preneta has been invited to present on SOIL’s behalf at the Faecal Sludge Management Conference later this month. This is a fantastic opportunity to continue spreading the word about SOIL’s unique and effective utilization of EcoSan technology to provide essential services throughout Haiti, simultaneously combatting two of the country’s worst problems: lack of sanitation and environmental degradation. Additionally, the conference is a unique chance for SOIL to plug in to a primarily research-focused community, helping move us towards our goal of conducting more research and ...
CGI Breakout Session "Haiti: Lessons for the Future"
The annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York took place earlier this week, featuring numerous presentations, breakout sessions, and discussions. SOIL co-founder and Executive Director Sasha Kramer participated in the "Haiti: Lessons for the Future" session on Monday, September 24, contributing to an ongoing conversation about moving development in Haiti forward, focusing on the progress that has happened over the past few years, and highlighting needs still to be met. Watch video footage of the session at the CGI webpage (if you want to skip ahead and see Sasha's presentation, it starts at 1:10:06) and check out photos below. [sl...
The Price of Public Sanitation
A recent article in the Los Angeles Times featured the "Portland Loo", a public toilet model used and marketed by the city of Portland, OR. The Portland Loo solves many of the problems associated with urban public toilets in the United States: cleanliness, graffiti, damage, and facility abuse. The LA Times article also touts the toilet's relatively low cost: a $60,000 installation fee, followed by $1,200 monthly for maintenance. To read the entire article, click here. The article serves as a welcome and useful reminder that public sanitation is not and cannot be free. Thankfully, SOIL public toilets do not come with a $60,000 price tag, but our ...
Engineering for Change: "Five questions with Sasha Kramer"
Written by Rob Goodier for Engineering for Change on July 8, 2012 Sasha Kramer's enthusiasm for recycling poop is contagious. After hearing from her, it's not hard to imagine the need to give your indoor bathroom a Stone-Age rennovation. She developed EcoSan latrines that store human waste in removable 15-gallon drums for composting. Toilets that transform waste into compost are the key to healthy soils and sustainable living, Kramer says. In that case, maybe everyone's toilet should be a modified pit latrine?
Another key to sustainability is sanitation itself. Kramer promotes both, taking her message of back-end recycling (get it?) to camps and ...
American Interest: Rebuilding Haiti: Why is it taking so long?
by Tate Watkins in American Interest, May 10, 2012. “The glass is 10 percent full,” says Nigel Fisher, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for reconstruction efforts in Haiti. “It’s now time to tackle the remaining 90 percent.” Yet more than two years after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and after billions of recovery dollars pledged by the United Nations, foreign governments, and private aid organizations, 10 percent full sounds appalling. An estimated 420,000 Haitians still live in tent camps. The cholera outbreak that began in October 2010 has killed more than 7,000 and infected more than 500,000. (In March, U.N. special envoy ...
SOIL Visit to EAA, Ouagadougou
This is one story from a multi-part series on SOIL's adventures in Africa. After a successful morning with the women of Dunkassa, Sasha, Bobo and I, accompanied by our ADESCA colleagues Zachary and Guninen, embarked on a road trip to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. The purpose of our trip was to visit the African water and sanitation organization EAA / WSA (Eau et Assainisement pour Africa / Water and Sanitation for Africa), formerly known as CREPA. Sasha had first heard of the work of CREPA in 2005 whilst at an EcoSan conference in Durban, South Africa, and SOIL had long benefitted from their research and from their online publications. ...
June 2011: Dear Friends of SOIL
Dear Friends, I have waited to write this letter to you, waited to have some good news to share, wanted toshare hope and not disillusionment, wanted to reassure you that the program we have developed since the earthquake will continue to serve families in need. But as today marks the first day of hurricane season in Haiti, cholera is on the rise again and SOIL is poised to begin closing down our public toilets in the camps of Port au Prince for lack of funds, I can wait no longer. SOIL was built on the kindness of our friends and supporters around the world. For four years we grew our organization on your generosity alone, ...