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Latin America
Partner Profile: Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL)
Hesperian collaborators Sasha Bryn Kramer, Sarah Brownell and Kevin Foos recently started SOIL, a non-profit organization to help address health, sanitation, environmental degradation, and poverty in Haiti. SOIL––Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods––will develop low-cost, accessible, ecological sanitation in Haitian communities.
One of SOIL’s first projects has been to translate Sanitation and Cleanliness for a Healthy Environment (a Hesperian environmental health booklet) into Haitian Kreyol (Creole). The first run of 200 copies will be distributed to teachers this September for the start of the school year. Teachers will incorporate the material into their curriculum and take their classes to visit SOIL’s demonstration ecological toilets. SOIL staff also translated Hesperian’s companion booklet, Water for Life, and they hope to have it ready for use by September as well.
Sasha Bryn Kramer, who has worked in Haiti for several years, describes the need for such a project: “As the political climate stabilizes, I have shifted my human rights work to address issues of economic and social rights, such as the right to clean water, sanitation, and a means of livelihood. During the two years that I spent as a human rights observer in Haiti, the most pervasive violence that I saw was the violence of poverty. There are communities with no toilets or access to clean water, communities where someone in every family is sick and cannot afford to go to the doctor, rural areas where the young men leave in droves searching for life in the cities.
At the root, many of these problems result from the ways in which global injustices have reshaped ecological systems, highlighting the vicious cycle of poverty and environmental destruction.
Lack of jobs, education and services pushes people deeper into poverty, creating situations where the only means of survival is to cut trees for charcoal, times when the only place to go to the bathroom is by the river, constraints where the only way to make a profit is to farm more and more land each year as the soil slips away into the ocean.
Ecological sanitation is a simple low-cost approach to sanitation where human waste is transformed from a dangerous pollutant to a valuable fertilizer. For more information on the project and photos of the first composting toilets that teams from Milot and Borgne built this summer, check out the website www.oursoil.org.”
Read what others are saying about us!
Here you'll find excerpts from letters and e-mails we've received in recent years noting the impact of our materials on particular communities, organizations or projects:
"A book for midwives has been an invaluable tool. Your holistic (personal, political, practical) approach is very relevant… without including "why" things are the way they are, we can't help people understand the larger social-economic context. Your publications are without a doubt the best source available for working in the developing world (and applicable in the "developed" world as well). Thank you!!!! I couldn't do what I do without you."
Jenna Houston
Nurse/Midwife and Training Program for Midwifes
Guatemalan Highlands
In early 2001, Hesperian published a training guide which explained how organizing a community health walk could help uncover environmental health threats such as mishandled garbage, toxic waste, and pesticides, as well as sparking community-wide discussions of how to address these problems.
The Red Fronteriza de Salud y Ambiente, a Mexican organization devoted to education and training for environmental and health activists on the U.S.-Mexico border, was so eager to use the health walk training guide that they took the initiative of translating the issue into Spanish (before we were able to do so) and printed 1000 copies for two conferences of border health workers. They have already tried the health walk with several groups and report that "it has been very well received."