- Lorraine Arroyo
- BBC World, Port-au-Prince
Like an oasis in the middle of the desert, Frantz Francois’s garden is probably the greenest place in Cité Soleil, the poorest neighborhood in Haiti and where, at first glance, it’s hard to find a tree.
But Francois had a hard time attracting his neighbors to the vegetables they grow because the fertilizer he uses in his garden is made from human manure.
«At first, people said that they were not going to eat anything from this garden because it grows with fertilizer that comes from the toilet,» he says, sitting in the place where he now teaches dozens of children and young people how to make an urban garden every day.
Things managed to change when they got their first harvest. Some members of her community saw the carrots, peppers and calalou – an edible plant native to the Caribbean used to make soups – and spread the word. Little by little, the neighbors were approaching their garden and trying the vegetables.
«Now when they see how the plants grow, they realize that they are not contaminated and everyone in Cité Soileil would like to have a garden like this at home,» he says.
Francois is in charge of an urban garden that uses a voucher from the ecological toilets of SOIL, an organization whose objective is to improve hygiene conditions in Haiti.
When the organization was created in 2006, only 4% of the rural population had access to toilets, while in Port-au-Prince that figure was slightly lower, at 6%, according to Baudeler Magloire, SOIL’s co-founder.
fear of toilets
This caused many people to use the street as a public bathroom, which facilitated the spread of diseases.
The lack of access to hygienic services became a health crisis in 2010 when, after the devastating earthquake that left more than 250,000 dead and 1.5 million displaced, a cholera epidemic broke out.
That disease, which is transmitted mainly through contaminated water, has since claimed the lives of more than 9,000 people in Haiti.
When cholera hit, SOIL had already taken its ecological toilets to different parts of the country, but the disease was a setback for the organization.
Several studies suggest that cholera was probably introduced into Haiti through Nepalese UN peacekeepers.
The epidemic caused the toilets to be viewed with suspicion and many residents asked the NGO that came from their neighborhoods to take the toilets away.
«In Haiti, when they talk to people about bathrooms, they get scared,» laments Jimmy Louis, SOIL’s coordinator of Sanitation Services.
But the organization chose to face up to the criticism and make the population aware of the importance of hygiene.
Today, more than 7,000 Haitians have access to its ecological toilets.
«The Disease of the Poor»
One of them is Midi Idemon, a 30-year-old student from the Gerald Bataille neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, who does not hesitate to say that the ecological toilets have made life more dignified for his family.
«Before having these, there was a community latrine. It was not good because there were people who did not clean, it smelled bad and there was a greater risk of contracting infections,» explains the young man who every week is in charge of going through the dirt streets of his bathroom neighborhood to check that all the ecological toilets work.
«With this project, we have a better life because at night, you can get up, open the door and go to the bathroom, and you can also clean your own bathroom.»
For Paul Christian Namphy, coordinator of the National Directorate of Drinking Water and Sanitation (Dinepa), providing the population with ecological forms of sanitation is an important aspect to prevent cholera and a very promising initiative for the future of Haiti.
«Cholera is the disease of the poor, of the marginalized, the disease of those who for centuries have not had access to the minimum that is needed to have a dignified existence,» he says.
«We have to make sure that people have access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, and are aware of hygiene practices to break the chain of transmission.»
Precisely to put an end to diseases such as cholera, SOIL collects excrement from the communities and homes of its users four times a month and takes it to a composting plant where possible bacteria die.
In order for it to become suitable fertilizer for agricultural use, the compost it must remain between 8 and 12 months in heaps at high temperatures (above 54 degrees Celsius) where even the most dangerous bacteria cannot survive.
«It’s like a circle: eat, go to the bathroom and then give it back to nature. The main idea is to recycle resources,» says Louis, SOIL’s Sanitation Coordinator.
This organic fertilizer, which is already being sold to some local farmers, is also used in SOIL’s seed gardens where they produce products as varied as corn, spinach, potatoes, peppers or rice and are testing how it works with other products such as zucchini. or beans.
In a country where, according to the World Food Program, close to a third of the population suffers from food insecurity and 600,000 people need external food assistance to survive, initiatives like this can help combat a huge problem.
And that is what Frantz Francois tries to do from his community garden in Cité Soleil, where he teaches children and young people to create their own garden with old car tires and organic fertilizer.
«Almost all the residents of Cité Soleil come from the countryside, so instead of going to the streets to sell water or other things, they learn to have a garden at home.»