St. Nicholas Kristof reports on an NGO called SOIL turns human waste into fertilizer in Port-au-Prince. Kristof writes, "Frankly, I was taken aback when, 10 minutes after they had met me, they pulled out a Ziploc bag and proudly declared that it was compost made from their own toilet." Beauty from ashes?
Margaret sent me a link to this MSNBC article that reports being a mother in Haiti is dangerous business. This reminded me that although Mountains focuses mainly on delivering health care to the poor, there are other professions and skilled intimately involved in promoting justice. Female literacy, for example is a key factor (more so than male literacy) in improving the quality of life of women and their families.
Finally, a more recent article focusing on the work PIH is doing in Rwanda, and a few bits about Farmer's family life, which may or may not placate some of your concerns.
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I enjoyed the article on SOIL. Floresta utilizes composting toilets in the DR and in Mexico as well.
ReplyDeleteSide note-my life dream is teaching women how to read in a Latin American country. If anyone has any ideas on how I can get started on that, please let me know:)
btw: is Nicholas Kristof a Saint?
Huh, awesome life dream. In liu of immediate practical suggestions, I'll offer one more really inspiring link (the one I meant to put up their but my Google-fu failed me). Money quote: "Female literacy [in contrast to female's outside employment literacy] is found to have an unambiguous and statistically significant reducing impact on under-five mortality, even after controlling for male literacy. This is consistent with growing evidence of a close relationship between female literacy and child survival in many countries in the world..."
ReplyDeleteRe: Kristof - Not really, unless sainthood is directly proportional to the amount of articles your write about countries 90% of your column's readers didn't know existed.