Ecological Sanitation in post-earthquake Haiti

Vincent is showing his clean hands. Photo: Hadas

Just two years ago the city of Port-au-Prince collapsed. In a matter of minutes hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives as this proud city crumbled to the ground. In remembrance and mourning, we ask that you take a moment of silence to honor the dead and share the suffering of more than 500,000 people who remain homeless in Haiti’s capital.

There are many reasons to despair when remembering the tragedy that took place two years ago and the terrible suffering that continues today. But on the second anniversary of the earthquake that has brought so many of us together on a common mission to help Haiti, we want to share with you a story of hope. The story starts in Parc Izmery.

In those awful first days after the earthquake, when SOIL staff drove our old pickup truck down from Cap-Haitien, overflowing with the emergency medical and food supplies that your donations helped us buy, we moved into the yard behind the Matthew 25 Guest House, next door to the Parc Izmery soccer field. During those awful first days, when aftershocks were still shaking our almost broken hearts, we watched Parc Izmery turned into an emergency field hospital with volunteer medical teams from around the world conducting lifesaving surgeries on Matthew 25’s dining room table and providing ongoing medical care to the people moving into tents crowded together in the hot sun on the former soccer field.

Nepal: Women can lead toilet construction work and support their family

The Kamalamai Integrated Water Sanitation and Hygiene (KIWASH) improvement project in Kamalamain Municipality in Sindhuli District, in the Janakpur zone of central south Nepal has envisaged adhering equity and inclusion prospective in project activities. The Centre for Integrated Urban Development (CIUD) has been working there in partnership with WaterAid in Nepal (WAN) since 2005 to provide safe and adequate water and sanitation including improvement in hygiene. One of the components is to facilitate and support in household sanitation improvement primarily focusing poor and marginalized communities in peri urban areas.

Bathanchoudi is one of the communities where toiletfacilities are being constructed. A local user committee “Bathanchoudi Batawara Tatha Tole Sudhar Samiti” has been formed to run the construction works smoothly and to make the community people accountable towards the development works and maintain the transparency. The majority of the committee members are women and from marginalized group i.e. Danuwar community. The leadership of the committee is run by Sarita Danuwar as a president of the committee.

With access to the toilet came access to dignity

There have been encouraging increases in the number of poorer people who are able to access toilets in Deoghar and Pakur districts of Jharkhand, India, thanks to the Total Sanitation Campaign.  While this is a reason for optimism, questions do arise: “Who benefits? Is this programme really catering to ALL?”

This Government of India programme offers incentives for families below the poverty line to construct toilets with technical designs approved by the District Water and Sanitation Mission (DWSM) responsible for sanitation.

Transforming lives of PLHAs through WASH Services

Mr. S. Singh is a driver in Chandauli district of Uttar Pradesh state. He was known, and perhaps envied, for his fearlessness and his well built physique.  Over the years, Singh witnessed a rapid deterioration in health, with several episodes of diarrhoea. His frequent visits to doctors led to more expenses and when he was tested for HIV in 2005, he was shocked to find that he was positive.

By the time he came to know of his HIV status, his wife and three children were also found to be HIV +. He was unable to recover from this shock for several months. Slowly he was able to accept reality due to consistent counselling from District Level Networks (DLNs) of HIV positives, a group of NGOs running Drop in Centres (DICs), and interaction with and solidarity from similarly affected persons.

Changing Socio cultural practices related to Sanitation in India

As far back as 1997, remote villages in Uttarakhnad (Himalayan mountain region)women were unwilling to get married into the households where some privacy for sanitation was not available.
Same communities reported that having migrant sons in service in other towns, the families would be reluctant to travel to the village to visit or stay for any length of time if there was no toilet facility- when we travelled to understand the initiatives related to infrastructure and development in the region, we found man of these toilets locked or used for storage of grass- to keep the grass dry.

Notes from Story telling session during the Opening of the water house. 30.9.09

I got interested in stories because stories explain logical reflection from people’s actions that seemed illogical to me as un outsider and explain what their underlying reasons are.

 Women in a village in Morogoro, Tanzania, used two wells. They maintained one well and not the other Why? Because the maintained one was a drinking wells and the “not maintained” well was a well for clothes washing and bathing.

Our Successful Partnerships, Success Story and Successful Projects

Three years ago, Life and Water Development Group Cameroon and its US partners, Hope College chapter of Engineers Without Borders USA started a water project in the community of Nkuv, Cameroon. A locality out of Kumbo in the North West Region of Cameroon.

Laying the pipe into the pipeline

The project history started as follows: Mr. Peter Njodzeka, the founder of LWDG-Cameroon submitted a project application to the EWB USA and Hope College Chapter was awarded the project, and from that moment the EWB USA linked their chapter Hope College with Peter Njodzeka to discuss the possibilities and understanding the project. Hope College traveled to Nkuv, Cameroon for their first time in March 2006 for an assessment trip, and returned in May 2006 for a tentative implementation. We tried drilling wells using hand drilling equipment, which was a fiasco, we could not find water and could only find rocks and dry sand. This first trial, which was a failure, Hope College did not surrender, they returned in December the same year and constructed three biosand filters trial, which some people in the community were using to filter their water directly carried from streams, and after six months, the health survey team from Hope College had a good results from the families using filtered water, and we increased the number to 15 filters, during this time, we were trying other ways out searching for water sources in the mountains, we finally found a spring, but after testing, the results were not good for consumption because of cows that are all year round in these hills.

We, the Women of Jayyous

Take a tractor ride through the Jayyous countryside behind the Wall, where more than 70% of the village’s land and all six of its groundwater wells have been confiscated. See the illegal Israeli dump with industrial waste from the settlements located just above Azzoun’s Well, from where the Jayyous residents now get their water. Learn about the sewage crisis affecting 90% of Palestinians in the West Bank. And meet the women of Jayyous, who together with LifeSource, are beginning to do something about all of this. Click to see a video story from the Arab water Channel:

BURKINA FASO: Multimedia tools help to change hygiene behaviour in Bokin district

Solar powered computers, digital cameras and projectors are being used in 20 remote villages in Burkina Faso to raise awareness over hygiene and help people adopt good practices. The NGO which has introduced the multi-media hygiene programmes believes that their high tech approach is having a higher impact on hygiene awareness, compared to using of pictures on cards. “We noted that people are more willing to stop their bad practices”, says Paulin Ouédraogo, coordinator of the Burkinabese NGO Sahel Solidarité. And one of the facilitators noted: “With the old method, 15 people were educated, but with the multimedia tools, we reach the whole village.” Reed more at: http://www.irc.nl/page/49635

Potable Water Supply Women Empowerment Project

Existing source of water for the dwellers of Lemlem Cheffe and Girmiabo Kebeles is surface water which is of poor quality. Due to this they suffer from water born, water related and water washed diseases. In Gimbichu Woreda as in most developing communities fetching water is a task left entirely to women which takes most of their time. The main target of the project are 200 women and 4,800 dwellers whose health are most affected due to lack of potable water.