We are REALLY excited up here at the Cap-Haitien office about our new cover material: ground peanut shells! We have been using bagasse (a byproduct of sugarcane production) for years, which has been doing the job, but perhaps not breaking down as fast as we would like. It’s important for us to have....
SOIL has 400,000 gallons of rich, organic compost curing in piles at our waste treatment sites around Haiti and we're producing more at a rate of 5,000 gallons a week! Check out the full story in the SOIL Spring Newsletter.
Last Sunday 12 young women from Cite Soleil visited the SOIL compost site in Pernier. The young women were from a local organization called SAKALA (supported by Pax Christi Haiti) which works on community development and conflict prevention in Cite Soleil. SOIL has been working with SAKALA for the....
"'Sanitation was the most successful health intervention in the modern world,' said SOIL co-founder and soil ecologist Sasha Kramer. But in Haiti, 'poop getting into water is the leading cause of death.' So far, SOIL has installed ecological toilets in camps of more than 20,000 people left homeless....
John Strutner from the University of Notre Dame recently traveled from Indiana to Haiti in order to collect samples of SOIL’s compost and test it for fecal pathogens. SOIL assiduously follows international public health standards for the composting of human waste as it converts over 5,000 gallons of....
Dear friends, I am sorry that I have been out of touch for the past several weeks. Every day is like a lifetime and at the end we just collapse into bed after a cold shower, and in the morning we sit up and look out at the camp spread before us and the whirlwind begins again. But most of us have....
By Matt Davis, Reed Magazine, Summer 2009 In the annals of public relations, it must be reckoned a signal achievement to persuade a skeptical New York Times reporter to stick his nose in a bucket of poop. But Sasha Kramer ’99 pulled off this reverse form of gotcha journalism with ease in March when....
By Joel K. Bourne, Jr., National Geographic, September 2008 The problem, says ecologist and activist Sasha Kramer, is that these days Haitian farmers can't sell enough mangoes to afford imported rice. To boost food production, Kramer and colleagues founded Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL), a nonprofit group that builds composting toilets in rural communities to get much needed organic matter and fertility back into fields. "With the current hunger crisis, it's very clear," says Kramer, an adjunct professor at the University of Miami. "If Haitians had more local production, they would not be so vulnerable to imported food prices."
