Former ab-fab community outreach intern, Katie Bliss, is back in the UK (sniff!), but she wrote me about Massukos, a popular band from Mozambique who have a strong commitment to humanitarian work in their country and abroad. She met one of the band members, Feliciano dos Santos, while she was in Cuba last month.
Dos Santos was one of 2008’s Goldman Environmental Prize winners [visit the site to see a short video profile]:
Using music to spread the message of ecological sanitation to the most remote corners of Mozambique, Feliciano dos Santos is empowering villagers to participate in sustainable development and rise up from poverty. In Niassa province, many villages lack even basic sanitation infrastructure. Without reliable access to clean water and waste management systems, the population is highly susceptible to disease. Santos, who grew up in the region, today heads an innovative program that is bringing new hope to Niassa. With his internationally-recognized band, Massukos, Santos uses music to promote the importance of water and sanitation in Mozambique. His program is now serving as a model for other sustainable development programs around the world.
Feliciano dos Santos Goldman Acceptance Speech and Song
Duration: 5min 8sec
Dos Santos along with the rest of Massukos and several other international artists have banded together for an Poo tour “to promote, educate and facilitate a wider understanding of life’s basic necessities – principally sanitation and clean water – in Africa”.
If you are in the UK and going to the Glastonbury festival (lucky devil), check Massukos out at the Jazz World Stage on Saturday, June 28th.
At the end of March, we and our community partner, SOIL, finished 2 urine-diverting dry toilets (a.k.a. ecosan toilets) in Shada, Cap-Haitien.
Here is part 2 of the pictorial how-to. You can find Part 1 here.
Building the stairs.
Molds for the toilet holes and pouring the concrete floor. Four plastic buckets are used to form the mold for where the toilet holes will be located for the 2 chambers. The concrete is poured and allowed to cure.
Lids for unused toilet holes.
Building the toilet house out of concrete block.
Finishing touches. The roof and door are added as well as a few accents. The chambers are sealed.
Urine Diverting Toilet and Urinal
Unfinished interior with urinal and 2 toilets (1 for adults, 1 for children). The simple urinal was constructed from cement with a wooden mold.
Urine collection drum and air vent. Hoses drain urine into the urine collection drum.
Pa jete fatra andedan twalet la!!! Don’t throw trash in the toilet. Latrine design allows for natural light and ventilation.
Squat Eco-san toilet with a bamboo superstructure in India
Duration: 2min 2sec
This squat latrine also has an area for cleansing.
Ecosan toilet in Bangalore
4min 47sec
Ecosan toilet in an urban area and that too on a first floor.The source separating pan ensures that urine and faeces is collected separately. The system has been designed for the Indian condition,squatters (not sitters) and washers(not wipers). A rainwater collection system collects rain from he roof into a barrel. The water for ablution purpose comes entirely from rain. A Tippy Tap dispenses water in small doses for cleansing. The urine itself is used as a fertilizer for plants and the faeces composted for application to soil. The Ecosan system is a water conserving,resource generating and pollution preventing system, good for urban areas and rural places especially.
Dry Toilet-Barrio La Vega, Venezuela
This clip is too short to tell you enough about the system, however the rain water catchment system to include, presumably for handwashing, is a great idea.
Description:
The Millennium Campus Network (MCN) is an organization of university student groups in the Boston area committed to supporting the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to eradicate extreme poverty. The Network brings together student organizations at leading universities to make the anti-poverty movement - in the spirit of the MDGs - a fully cross-disciplinary, collaborative and integrated effort.
The MCN’s Millennium Campus Conference will be hosted by different member universities each year, with the MCN hosting a series of seminars, workshops, and projects in between each conference. The inaugural conference, hosted by the MIT GPI, will open MCN’s resources and mentorship opportunities to the hundreds of students interested in starting or continuing work in poverty alleviation in the coming year.
Schedule:
Day 1 - Friday 4/18
9-11am
Registration
11am-12pm
Opening keynote
1-2pm
Technology keynote:Amy Smith
2:15-3:30pm
Track Session 1
Economics: Globalization: The Panacea for Poverty?
Education: The Bottom Up Approach
Health: AIDS in Zambia: A Personal Account
Public Policy: Leading the Charge Against Global Poverty
Technology: The Technological Chasm in ICT
3:30-5:30pm
PANEL: Stories from the Field: Student Work in Poverty Alleviation
Movie Screening: Salud
6:00-10pm
Evening Activities
Day 2 - Saturday 4/19
8-9:30am
Registration
9:30-10:30am
Health keynote: Paul Farmer
10:45am-12pm
Track Session 2
Economics: Banking for the Poor
Education: Bridging the Technology Gap for Educational Growth
Health: Health Challenges of Today: New Versions of Old Diseases
Public Policy: Power, Responsibility, and Extreme Poverty
Technology: “Small is Beautiful”: Appropriate Technology
12-1pm
Education keynote: John Wood
1-2:30pm
Networking Luncheon (limited to 100 attendees)
1-3:30pm
Student Expo for Social Change
3:45-5pm
Track Session 3
Economics: Institutional Aid: Harmful or Essential?
Education: Cost-Effective Education
Health: : Obstacles to Healthcare Delivery
Public Policy: Faith and Famine
Technology: The Green Revolution and the Fight Against World Hunger
5-6pm
Action Workshop - Starting Projects for Global Change
Action Workshop - Leadership and Organizations: Leading Your Peers to Change the World
They’ve pulled together solid numbers behind the hype by distilling (pun intended) multiple Kamen articles and interviews.
It is designed to supply a village with 1,000 liters/day of clean water. (Colbert Report)
You can use any water source — ocean, puddle, chemical waste site, hexavalent chrome, arsenic, poison, 50 gallon drum of urine. (Colbert Report)
Vapor compression distillation is not new. Doing it in such an incredibly efficient way such that it takes only 2 percent of the power of convention distillers is new. (R&D World and Gizmodo commenter)
The are no filters to replace, no charcoal, no anything disposable (just distillation). (Colbert Report)
The Slingshot (as its called) can use half the waste heat (450 watts) from a sterling engine electrical generator (prototype also being designed by Kamen’s company) to boil its water. (TED)
The heat put into the water is recovered with a “counter-flow heat exchanger” and recycled to heat the next batch of water (that is part of the novel bit). (TED and Gizmodo commenter)
Slingshot will be less then 60 lbs. (TED)
The prototype slingshot was hand-built for $100K. The goal is to get production units down to $1,000 to $2,000. (CNN)
The sterling engine, used as an electrical generator, can produce about 200 watts of power (it will never be more then 20 percent efficient) and 800 watts of waste heat (the waste heat that slingshot uses). TED
Later sources say the sterling engine can generate 1 kilowatt or enough power for 70 high-efficiency light bulbs. (CNN)
The sterling engine can run on anything that burns, propane or even cow dung. (CNN)
The slingshot is a David and Goliath reference aimed at putting water and power back in the hands of the individuals. (AP)
The Potential (key word being potential) Site for the Municipal Biogas plant
The mayor’s office in Cap-Haitien has offered us 60 acres of government land to be dedicated for the waste-to-energy project. A separate environmental minister, however, is also interested in turning the site into a much-needed landfill. We’ll keep you posted.
Last Tuesday (2/12/08), we visited Shada, a riverbank shantytown in Cap-Haitien, and met with Madame Bwa. She greeted us all warmly with a hug when arrived in our pickup truck. We had to leave the truck out on the crowded bustling road. The streets are in no way wide enough to drive in. In a few passageways, Pete needed to turn sideway to accommodate his shoulders.
Madame Bwa, our community liaison, is the type of woman who would be on the League of Women Voters if she were here. The type who sees a problem in her community and tries to do what she can to address it. She runs a tiny program out of her house to teach some of the local children hygiene and basic health skills. I believe she is also a mid-wife, but I have to verify that one later.
Between 10,000 and 20,000 people live along Shada’s labyrinthine streets. The homes are made of cinder block and corrugated iron, some with or without doors. The shore is a combined dumping area/pig trough/children’s toilet. As we tread carefully, many of the little ones cavort around us barefoot, somehow avoiding glass and feces.
Overhang toilets on stilts dot the shoreline adding to the pollution to the river delta. We will be working there with SOIL and the community to replace some of these toilets. The people we’ve talked to in the community are anxious for change. On Pete’s last visit, a resident admonished him “Are you going to help us or are you just going to study like all the other blancs?” [Blanc = white person, foreigner] While we are grateful for the deliberate and well-planned out studies performed by/with some of the larger non-profits working in Haiti, folks who are living in the situation are interested in a lot more action and a lot less deliberation. Fair enough. We will do our best.
A few portraits.
I didn’t catch everyone’s names as the kids were jockeying for position to have their photo taken. Cuties.
Cheriline
This beautiful little one [her mama had me take her picture] later went to the bathroom unabashedly in front of us all, amidst the piles of garbage.
The dumping area in Shada
The Haitian pig, sturdy and resilient. It can live in situations where American pigs would shrivel up and die. [Check out this 1993 article from the New Scientist about the U.S. eradication program of the Haitian pig in the 1980’s.]
Overhang Toilets
The community is going to organize a meeting between us and the owner(s) of the overhang pay toilets to coordinate their destruction and replacement with newer latrines. People who use the overhang toilets typically have to pay 1-2 Goudes. Though ramshackle, they offer people, particularly women, a modicum of privacy when they want to relieve themselves. In the above photo, a pig rustles through trash and feces underneath the toilet.
I had a tough time writing this post. I wrote a lot, then cut out a lot, repeat ad nauseum. What I don’t want folks to leave with is a feeling of hopelessness. Don’t be mistaken; life is hard for the residents of Shada. It’s true that people need help, but they aren’t helpless. They are dignified in a situation that strives to rob them of that dignity. They are waiting for change.
I just got to Cap Haitien yesterday morning so the blogging schedule will be irregular for the next 2 weeks. I don’t have much time to write at the moment, but I wanted to post 2 stories in the news right now about Haiti.
Eating Dirt to Stay Alive
Duration: 40sec
With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice. Now some people are taking desperate measures to fill their bellies. (Jan. 29)
Translated from the French. My translation skills aren’t great so not everything will be right and some of the lyricism of the writing will be lost. I put elipses (…) where I hadn’t a clue what they the author was going on about.
Pete got this picture during his last visit to Haiti.
For the 12,000 inhabitants of “Shada”, a shantytown in Cap-Haitien, there are only about five latrines available. Soon, more ecological latrines will be built through the EAuCap project and carried out by a consortium including Oxfam GB, Protos, the Intermediary Technology Group of Haiti (GTIH), and the state officials.
In some passageways of Shada, teenagers play hopscotch. In others, cobblers repair third-hand shoes to sell them cheaply in the Northern capital’s public market. Surveying the grim alleyways of Shada, an active community life is revealed. Women, squatting in an intersection, comment on the neighboring couple’s argument from the previous night. As soon as a stranger approaches, they change the subject.
A few meters away in another passageway, children, naked like Adam and Eve in their innocence, force themselves to smile. Teenagers follow, scowling,… singing and tossing around funny catch phrases like at carnival. But after a few minutes more of walking, another sordid spectacle is offered to this Matin reporter. Young people squat single file and without any embarrassment evacuate their intestines under the open sky into latrines (the sea).
In desperate need of public health intervention
Promiscuity, insalubrity and with its open-air public latrines, “Shada” is in desperate need of public health interventions. This mazelike shantytown situated on the seashore at the western end of Cap-Haitien is a tough case for the local authorities. Like Fort Saint-Michel, the Cité Soleil of Cap, “Shada” is regarded as another garbage dump. The inhabitants live folded up on themselves, every man for himself.
To build public latrines in this space of degrading misery is, says one official, is an impossibility, not achievable. However, the parties involved in the EAuCap project, namely state officians and the three participating nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), Oxfam GB, Protos and the Intermediary Technology Group of Haiti (GTIH), believe different. Initially, the consortium gathered all community groups of “Shada” and introduced a hygiene promotion campaign. After several group education sessions, the construction of pilot latrines was chosen as the top priority for the inhabitants.
“Social Marketing”
Financed by the European Union (EU) to the tune of 3 million USD, EAuCap sees “Shada” as a challenge. According to the project coordinator, “After three months, the team is still in the discussion phase”. Kone Amara, of Cote D’Ivoire, explains, saying that the engineers have carried out the technical analysis of the latrine design … and have discussed of the costs. What remains is the approval of the residents of “Shada” because, he insists, they do not want to build for the sake of building. The idea is to carry out long-lasting projects that can serve as examples to other financial backers in other zones. “Moreover”, adds the assistant coordinator of the project EAuCap, “The initiative to build these latrines < > social marketing. This requires a low cost and an easy management”. With regards to the models presented to the community, the faeces will be either dried and used to make compost, or mucked out after at least a year.
“Shada”, according to Samuel Mondestin, is the first district which the authorities plan to move [not sure if that is translated correctly]. The needs are urgent. The national police officers do not venture into this shantytown regardless of the announced incident or the offence: crime, riot, brawl, rapes or burglaries. However, facing all the dangers, the EAuCap’s engineering team is there almost each day. For it is time that another framework of life is offered to the people of “Shada”.
Blog 
