Chita pa bay. Translation: Sitting down brings you nothing.

 

Caretaker of community toilet (standing left) with former staff member of Youthaiti in front of Youthaiti dry toilet in Les Caves.

 

In celebration of World Toilet Day, we are grateful to the friends and family who stand behind us every day so we can stand up to a problem that affects the entire earth and half the people who inhabit it. We are asking you to continue standing in partnership with Youthaiti and the rural Haitian communities we serve, helping them help themselves. Sitting down brings you nothing—except when it comes to  toilets. Sitting down in a clean, safe twalet results in health, social status, and dignity. #worldtoiletday2019

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New school toilet in Goyave

Summer went by fast, and school is now open.  In Goyave, a community far from Duchity, Youthaiti has partnered with St. Margaret Mary church in Neenah, Wisconsin to build a new toilet at the grade school.  Here is their glowing report of the work done by our technician/educator, Jean Emy “Manlove” Elysee:
The Inauguration of the Dry Toilet at Our Lady of Lourdes in Goyave was performed on Monday, 9/3/18, in conjunction with the students first day of school.  Father Pol indicated that this was a great day to perform the inauguration as many parents were there for the first day of school.  There were also a number of the community members there specifically for the Dry Toilet inauguration. 
 
  The presentation was made by Manlove, the technician from Youthaiti responsible for construction of the toilet, training the workers on the construction techniques and instructing individuals to care for and maintain the toilet.  
 
 As the people were gathering around the toilet, you can tell that the children are curious and Fr Pol must tell the children to come down  and informs them that the Toilet belongs to them. 
 
Manlove  expressed his thanks to the workers and volunteers who helped construct the toilet and provided food and water.    Manlove made at least a half-dozen trips from his home in Duchity, about as far as you can get from Goyave and still be in Haiti (it is easily an 8 hour one-way trip.)
 
Manlove explained why it is called a “Dry” toilet because the urine is separate from the solids as the human waste is collected.  When a person uses the toilet properly, the urine flows one direction and the solid waste goes in another so that they can be collected and treated separately.  (The urine is later mixed with water in order to be able to be used in gardens as a healthy fertilizer.   The solids require more work as dry materials such as ash and sawdust is added to the solids to encourage composting.  This also makes very rich fertilizer.) 
 
Manlove informed the people of the benefits of a Dry Toilet design as it practically eliminates the ability of human waste to negatively affect their environment and even has a positive impact from the generation of fertilizer.  A Dry Toilet does not allow the leakage of waste into the ground and the water supply.  Manlove said that this toilet is the first step for the community and that hopefully in time there will be more as more people use environmentally safe waste management alternatives.  
 
With the enthusiasm that resonates from his teaching background, Manlove explains the risks involved when the water supply and environment is contaminate by human waste.  Diseases such as typhoid, cholera, worms and other dysentery conditions are directly related to waste contamination in the water supply.  He points out that open defecation (which is the most common method of disposing human waste in the area) has double the contaminating affects as other human waste collection systems.  In addition to open defecation being washed into the water systems during the rainy season, the dry season promotes turning solid waste into dust, which gets blown around into the environment and attaches itself to just about anything that comes into human contact (plants, animals, food, water, human skin, air that is breathed, etc).
 
Throughout his presentation, Manlove encouraged the community to do other things that will help the community rise up from contaminating their environment.  He explained other alternatives that the community can do but mostly encouraged them to stay away from open defecation.  While building a structure similar to the one for the school is not practical for individual families, there are other alternatives, such as having their own family toilets.  Smaller pits, can be used to contain the waste, while reducing the impact on the environment.  The family toilets should be kept shallow and away from water sources such as streams, rivers and lakes.
 
The final instruction from Manlove’s presentation is the importance of hygiene and to teach children at a young age on the proper methods of waste management and hygiene.  Emphasis is placed on education of the children so that as they move into society, they will understand and promote the proper waste management and hygiene. 
 
We saw the passion of Manlove, Youthaiti and Fr. Pol to help Haitians improve their conditions.  We believe that this construction and use of the Dry Toilet is an important 1st step in human waste management in Goyave, which will hopefully promote and encourage further steps towards a clean and safe environment for all in the community. 
 Thank you Manlove for your dedication and passion about sanitation and hygiene not just in Duchity, but throughout Haiti!
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Report from Haiti: World Hand-Washing Day

school & banner (3)
“Hand-washing, a mere and potential life-saving gesture.”

That’s it. That’s our slogan. It’s true and honest and important. And, it received the attention of school administrators and 1200 Haitian school kids on World Hand Washing Day, October 15.

We five Youthaiti staffers purchased and carried soap, banners, bleach, buckets, and brochures. At each location, we implemented our 30-minute program smoothly and effectively: Hang a banner, erect a hand-washing station, demonstrate with an explanation, and answer questions.

We introduced ourselves to one or two classrooms at a time, starting with the pre-schoolers, working through the administrative staff, and ending with the high-schoolers. With each group, we told demonstration (1)the what, why, when and how about hand-washing. In other words, we explained why our health AND LIVES depend on this practice. It was up to each of the students, we told them, to convey this message to their parents and siblings at home.

Those in the States often don’t understand why hand washing needs to be taught. Although we Haitians are extremely fastidious people, keeping our houses neat, our yards raked, and ourselves bathed daily, many of the poorer families don’t have the money for simple necessities like soap. Although every school child pays tuition (even to the public schools), the money goes to other items like books or pens and paper.

Youthaiti is able to address issues such as hand washing and bring its importance back into perspective. We can remind families and schools of its significance to their daily lives.

At the end of each program, we gifted each school with the materials from our demonstration. We sang the hand-washing song that many had learned from a promotional video we’d provided previously.

Men pwop se zanmi le sante (Clean hands are the friend of health),
Men sal se lenmi le sante (Dirty hands are the enemy of health).

We left the students singing while we moved to the next school.

 

Pierre OreusReport filed by Youthaiti Director, Pierre “Junior” Oreus

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Help celebrate World Toilet Day


Youthaiti volunteer, Jim Hagen, demonstrating a bucket toilet.

Youthaiti volunteer, Jim Hagen, demonstrating a bucket toilet.

 

by: J.O. Haselhoef


WHEN:

November 19

WHAT’s the big deal?
2.5 billion people, mostly in rural areas of developing nations, do not have access to proper sanitation facilities, resulting in 1.7 million children dying annually from sanitation-related diseases.

Let’s get more specific: Imagine you don’t have a toilet. You wake up in the morning and go to your back door and think, “Where can I take care of my personal business today?” You can hear your children getting out of their beds, their little bare feet padding across the floor. The two join you at the back door, hold each of your hands and say: 

Locally built privacy screen for a bucket toilet.

Locally built privacy screen for a bucket toilet.


“Mommy, where shall we poop today?” Your back yard is pretty big, but you want to make certain no one steps in yesterday’s dung. Suddenly Roger, your pet golden retriever, runs in from his doghouse. There’s an odor that accompanies him into your kitchen as you realize he’s already stepped in the dung and brought bits inside.

Open defecation, pit latrines, or the flying toilet, where excrement-filled plastic bags are thrown into road ditches or trash piles are three options to solving your daily need for a toilet in the country. Opportunities are fewer if you live in the city or suburbs. And, they become more complicated if you’re female, when needs for safety must accompany privacy.

In the US, for the most part, we don’t have this problem. In the developing nations, including Haiti, we have the issue but not always the solution. For example, 85% of Haitian rural residents don’t have access to toilets. 100% of Haitian drinking water is already contaminated with coliform bacteria.

For the poor, the cost of sanitation seems low on the list of household necessities. Many are aware that feces often carry disease. But, if you’re faced with putting food on the table (at a relatively low daily cost) or purchasing a toilet (at a relatively high cost), the first will happen and not the second.

At Youthaiti, we’ve advocated, and made available, three types of ecological toilets (the dry toilet, the arborloo, and the bucket toilet), all of which have shown economic and health benefits. Cost and acceptance have often stood in the way. Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) holds promise for achieving effective local buy-in (see CLTS Starts Smoothly Near Duchity) but requires consistent determination coupled with long-term effort.

WHERE can you get involved?

  1. Forward this email to one or many of your contacts.
  2. Post on https://www.facebook.com/youthaiti/?fref=ts or send an email to gigi@youthaiti.org. Tell us a story about your toilet, why you appreciate it, or just send us a photo (no open lids, please!)
  3. Donate to Youthaiti to put into reality an effective sanitation community in Duchity, Haiti.
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Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) Starts Smoothly near Duchity

Pierre Oreus

 from Youthaiti Director, Pierre “Junior” Oreus

by: J.O. Haselhoef

“Our first meeting did not happen due to the rains, but the second worked well because 35 villagers (mostly women) attended. An influential community leader, a voodoo priest, in the village of Bas Lacombe, one of the two locations we’ve targeted, arranged the meeting.

The Youthaiti staff and I used our Haitian history to introduce CLTS* — how our ancestors freed themselves from slavery, took their independence, and determined the ways they wanted to live. I could see from the change on the faces of the attendees, they understood our metaphor.

We began the first step of CLTS looking as if we were naive, asking the participants to tell us about their own personal sanitation habits. None of them knew the term, sanitation, but realized that each has some practice, good or bad, about where to dispose of body waste. All of their answers were identical: they defecate in the open, whether it’s behind a tree or a rock. When we asked if that was a good or bad practice, the answers included, “It’s bad. It can pollute the environment, our food.” “It can cause disease.” And, “It’s shameful to be defecating in the open.

Haitian communities are not unfamiliar with the effects of bad sanitation practices. During the height of the cholera outbreak some years ago, there was much work done in villages to educate the local peasants. Bas Lacombe was one of the villages in which cholera resulted in some local deaths. But no action, either collectively or individually, was taken in response.

The second step of the CLTS is to trigger a behavior change, and so during our next meeting we will take the participants on a mach pou lawont(Creole for “Walk of Shame”). Villagers will be able to literally, “face their own shit,” by looking at their daily actions from the viewpoint of others – guests to the village, family members who visit. It is that group walk that provides the collective awareness. It carries an impact that attendees share with their neighbors. It gives them the impetus to invite other neighbors to involve themselves in this process. The community walk encourages them to act together and make change.meeting

Haitians are strong and independent, but we have also been taught to depend on the many outsiders who have entered our country, either as controlling governments or even as well-meaning NGOs. Most of the villagers believe that Youthaiti has the money to build the toilets for them and our staff addressed this misconception frankly and openly. We reminded them that the strongest results of CLTS are from actions that communities take on themselves without outside help. We pointed out that already they have other community initiatives in place — they are building a road with no outside aid.

With our first meeting completed, Bas Lacombe must organize itself and decide together to ban open defecation. I hope its leaders will call in a few days to meet again. Once they have, Youthaiti can help them choose the right option (Arborloos, bucket toilets, etc.) based on their financial capacity and their tastes to help their community improve its sanitation practices.

I know change is not easy. I believe Youthaiti has helped it begin.”

 

 

*    At the heart of CLTS lies the recognition that merely providing toilets does not guarantee their use, nor result in improved sanitation and hygiene. Earlier approaches to sanitation prescribed high initial standards and offered subsidies as an incentive. But this often led to uneven adoption, problems with long-term sustainability and only partial use. It also created a culture of dependence on subsidies. Open defecation and the cycle of fecal–oral contamination continued to spread disease.

In contrast, CLTS focuses on the behavioural change needed to ensure real and sustainable improvements – investing in community mobilisation instead of hardware, and shifting the focus from toilet construction for individual households to the creation of open defecation-free villages. By raising awareness that as long as even a minority continues to defecate in the open everyone is at risk of disease, CLTS triggers the community’s desire for collective change, propels people into action and encourages innovation, mutual support and appropriate local solutions, thus leading to greater ownership and sustainability.

(from the CLTS website) http://www.communityledtotalsanitation.org/page/clts-approach

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a la pwochenn – until next time when we meet again

IMG_0292I always leave Duchity with mixed emotions.  Sad to leave my friends, so much work to be done yet, exhausted from long day, sun and rain, yet anxious to be back in my own bed again, and my home with running hot and cold water which you can drink straight from the tap.

I return on the eve of Passover, the Jewish holiday that celebrates our liberation from slavery in Egypt over 2000 years ago.  It is one of the ways I have long felt a bond with the Haitian people, the first successful modern slave rebellion in 1804.  But in so many ways are we not still slaves?  in the US many are slaves to fashion and materialism, to cars and homes and jobs that claim too many hours. In Haiti, too many people are slaves to a life struggle to eek out a living from the earth.  Yet we meet in a common ground of gratitude for the strength to make each day count and together to make a difference.

The ride from Duchity to Port au Prince is long, hot and dusty.  Despite major improvements in the road, it still took us over 7 hours to arrive as we entered the traffic of Port au Prince in mid-afternoon.  The contrast between the clean air of the mountains of Duchity and the stench of diesel fuel and garbage in Port au Prince is overwhelming.  Everyone from Duchity that has migrated to the capitol for hopes of work dreams of going back to a life centered on family and farming and less stress.  Yet the promise of work tears them away from their roots.

One of the aims of Youthaiti’s new Center for Sustainable Development is to help create the possibility of new enterprises for young men and women that will keep them in their communities.  Sustainable gardening is just one way.  There are many micro-enterprises that we have discussed and dream of, such as ecological charcoal briquette making, and ecological cook-stoves and simple bottle lights for people with tin roofs.  And working with other partners such as our engineering friends from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, we hope to find sustainable energy resources that can help promote agricultural production and preservation.

There was much excitement in Duchity for the Center.  Already our compost site is started, and our Arborloo is almost finished (it awaits the door).  Some gardens are planted, with more to come.  But without your help, we will have a site but not a building where people can stay to learn and to teach.

I am already starting to plan our next visit in July (dates TBD) and would love to have your help!  We need carpenters and schleppers, gardeners and solar electricity experts. We need folks with strong arms and backs, and also folks with hearts waiting to be broken open by the people, and especially the children, of Duchity.  If you any skill or none but a willingness to work, please contact me so we can figure out how you can fit in!

Be willing to have your life changed, as mine was 7 years ago…

as we say in Kreyol, ‘a la pwochenn’….until next time when we meet again!

gigi

 

 

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Inauguration in Lacombe

Letter from Haiti – March 18, 2012

I can’t wait to share the photos and video from today’s’ inauguration in Lacombe!!  A 1/2 hour drive and another 1/2 hour hike from Duchity, through beautiful verdant mountains and gardens brings you to a little spot of paradise where no one has water, electricity or toilets, but man! Do they know how to live!

We (Chris Yerling from Amherst, Mass, Pastor Duckens from Croix des Bouquets and I) were greeted suddenly by an African-roots rara band playing horns and bamboo sticks and singing. They accompanied us for the next 1 1/2 hours through the celebration of the newest Youthaiti toilet.  Although multiple rain delays had almost caused the inauguration to be postponed again, the final paint and concrete were being applied as we arrived.

Little by little the community settled down to listen to the presentation about the toilet and how it functions. The toilet is located in the yard of the family who had cholera, but is open for all to use in the community. Dozens of families still need somewhere “to go”. We shared with them the message of simple composting toilets they can do in their homes. I hope these ideas will take root.  Now finding a source of water that is closer than 2 hours walk away is one of their next great needs.

I look forward to visiting Lacombe again on my next visit in July. Who will join me?

If you want to see amazing video, join us at our fundraiser on May 4th, or invite me to speak.  I love sharing my experiences here, as i hope you’ll share your gifts with Youthaiti to help us create a Center where many more can try out simple sustainable technologies.

Tomorrow is our last day in Duchity. Next posting from Port au Prince!
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A Lesson in the Rain – March 16, 2013

Letter from Haiti

A Lesson in the Rain

March 16, 2013

It rained most of the day here in Duchity. We had planned on emptying one of the toilets that had finished decomposing, and so when there was a break in the rain we went over to the school to take a look.

As soon as we started to open the back of the toilet, it started to rain again. And then the rain got harder. But once we were there, there was no stopping!

And so, for over an hour, five men worked passing buckets of compost to the back of our truck to move to our newly built compost site at the Youthaiti Center for Sustainable Development.

They were wonderful, courageous, hard-working men, saying over and over again as they hauled those buckets in the rain:
“Pipi kaka bon bagay!” (“Pee and poo are good things!”)

There are lessons to be learned – about trying to beat the rain, and about managing the toilet.

As our coordinator for Grand’Anse, Franci Polyte likes to say: “Every day is school, we learn something every day.”

Tomorrow we will head down to Les Cayes for a board meeting. We’re praying for sun, so we can have lunch on Gelee Beach.

Only a few short days till we leave. But already we’ve learned a lot, and done a lot. We’ve inaugurated our latest toilet. And we’re finalizing the plans for the next phase in construction of the Youthaiti Center for Sustainable Development.

You can help! Donate instantly and securely to our construction crowdfund campaign!

 

– Gigi

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Launched: Online Campaign to Help Build the Center

We’ve started our online campaign to raise $10,000 for the next phase of building the Youthaiti Center for Sustainable Development.

See the details, and how to contribute, at http://www.igg.me/at/youthaiti

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Arborloos in rural Haiti

Dear friends,

I am in Haiti for a conference on Sustainable Sanitation in Haiti which begins Tuesday.  I had only one day to come visit our projects in Duchity and Pestel, and meet with our team on the ground.  But a very worthwhile visit.
3 years ago we began installing our first of 150 Arborloo latrines.  For these families it was the first time they had any kind of toilet.  An arborloo is basically a concrete platform over a shallow pit  in which human excrement is mixed with ash and dry leaves to form compost in the pit.  When the pit is filled. it is covered with soil and a fruit tree is planted in it. 
Today I visited about a dozen of our Arborloos to see how they were being used.  What I learned is that people really appreciate having a place ‘to go’, but that more education is needed to make sure they are maintaining them correctly as a compost site.  Our first Avocado tree is a good 15 ft tall, but not yet giving fruit. 
Our technicians have a plan to return to each area and review the education especially regarding hygiene.
There has been relatively little cholera in this area, so we are having some impact.  I will be glad when there is none.
Tomorrow I return to Port au Prince for the conference where I will have a chance to present our work and network with others working on sustainable sanitation in Haiti.
more later….
love
gigi

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