We arrived by bus in Cap-Haitien, the second largest city in Haiti located on the north shore. The bus ride was a 6-hour journey in which the bus barreled on and off paved and dirt roads, around donkeys, along cliff sides, and avoided tanker trucks on hair pin turns on steep mountain passes – very bonding with my Haitian seat neighbors! The countryside changed radically from one watershed divide to the next – arid yucca and cactus covered hillsides to banana-coconut-palm tropical food forests. We were warmly greeted by two of the SOIL Cap-Haitien staff, Monika Roy, Project Coordinator, and Theo Huitema, Regional Director, who scooped us up at the bus station and drove us to the SOIL city house in downtown Cap.
Downtown Cap-Haitien has many of the old French buildings with fancy wrap around balconies on every floor, many 3-4 stories high. The city is built on a grid system of letters and numbers so it is easy to get around. Many evenings we walked along the waterfront to lively restaurants with large dance floors and DJs.
In Cap-Haitien, SOIL runs 170 collection sites – 3 are public toilets with 15 gallon drums and the rest are households using 5 gallon buckets. The composting procedure is the same as used in Port-au-Prince. The Cap-Haitien arm is looking to expand from their current 170 eco-san toilets collection sites to 1000 household collection sites this year.
After touring the toilets in the city we arrived at the compost facility on the outside of town.
The process was very organized with piles of Konpos cooking from 122-160 degrees.
Help SOIL go big! Between April 10 – May 10, 2014, every dollar you donate to SOIL up to $75,000 will be matched by our friends at the 11th Hour Project! Help them raise the funds to quintuple their Cap-Haitien collection sites! As Brock says, if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the precipitate. And you know what that means in this case! Be part of the solution! Donate now! It is as easy as hitting this link: http://www.oursoil.org/
