Long before an earthquake devastated sections of Haiti early this year, the island nation struggled to provide basic services to its citizens. That’s why Milwaukee nurse Gigi Pomerantz, founder of Youthaiti, decided to raise funds and build an organization devoted to installing eco-friendly toilets in a village that had none and creating sustainable community gardens.
Youthaiti will hold a benefit on Saturday, May 15, in honor of Haitian Flag Day, at the Turner Hall Ballroom. Tickets are $100; Pomerantz says the funds will go directly toward funding more toilets.
Pomerantz spoke with the Shepherd to explain Haitians’ needs, how the earthquake is bringing more people to the small village she’s adopted, and how Youthaiti’s work has changed since the earthquake hit.
Shepherd: What were the Haitians’ living conditions like when you first traveled there?
Pomerantz: When I first went there in February 2006 I was on a medical mission. The work was centered in this mountain village of about 7,000 people. Frankly, the first trip I was there we had much less contact with actual living conditions. The church groups that go tend to be kind of cloistered into the church compound. We visited one person’s house. It was kind of overwhelming to see ten people living in a one-room house, with basically all of the mattresses piled up, and trying to imagine what they did at night. Since that time I’ve spent a lot of time in people’s houses. It’s interesting. Stuff that overwhelmed me the first time doesn’t overwhelm me anymore. You just kind of get used to it.
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Shepherd: And now you’re providing them with some very basic necessitiestoilets.
Pomerantz: It wasn’t an idea I came up with myself. I didn’t invent them. On that first trip I happened to read a booklet that the team leader had brought along, “Sanitation and Cleanliness for a Healthy Environment.” I sat in a meeting where there was translation going back and forth so I had downtime and I found it fascinating. I’ve always been interested in ecological stuff. I have a little backyard garden and I compost but I just looked at it and was like these are simple ideas. People can do this. They just don’t know about it. That’s where it started. Then I started to explore more and found that there were people who were already doing it and could give me some direction. And I built on it from there.
Shepherd: So there’s basically no infrastructure.
Pomerantz: [laughs] There is no infrastructure. There’s a public market where there wasn’t a toilet, and there are hundreds of people there, sitting all day long. Even now we’re having difficulty because the people coming in on horses or donkeys park their horses or donkeys right in front of where we built a toilet. It’s terrible! But we have not been able to negotiate another place. It’s been a real frustration.
Shepherd: How much does a toilet cost?
Pomerantz: A dry toilet, a one-holer, is about $2,500 now. In a lot of places we build a two-holer, which is closer to $4,000. They’re basically made with local materials from concrete block and PVC pipe. That’s basically all that’s required and they’re all built by local workers.
An Arborloo costs about $22. What we provide is just a concrete platform, about two and a half feet squared. The families who have come and received all of the training are eligible. We usually have to do a lottery because we only have so many to give away. They have to locate an appropriate place, they have to dig a hole, and they have to put up their own shelter. Our staff looks periodically to make sure they’re taking care of it. The Arborloos are household toilets. The dry toilets are public toilets.
Shepherd: How was the village affected by the earthquake?
Pomerantz: Mainly by all of this out-migration from Port au Prince. The main village where I’m functioning, it’s approximately 7,000 population, and something like 800 returned. So imagine: 600,000 live people in Milwaukee and growing it 10% with no infrastructure and people not having any more money to buy food or anything like that. What I have read on various links that some people are taking the bean that they had for planting as seed and they’re using it to feed people, which leaves them with nothing to plant. I did have people asking me for money for seed when I was there in February.
Shepherd: What was it like to go back after the earthquake?
Pomerantz: The whole thing was a trip and a half. We took 11 suitcases between the two of us. Just that was a challenge. We had collected a bunch of medical supplies and dressings and clothes. We had to fly into the Dominican Republic and fortunately a friend of mine was able to drive up to the Dominican Republic with a little entourage of cars. We kind of thought it was overkill. He came with four cars because he didn’t think that all of our luggage was going to fit. One of the cars died on the way back down to Haiti. They eventually made it after I left. But that was frustrating.
We went through the border without any problem. And you’re in Haiti like maybe 15 minutes across the border and you’re already seeing tents. Everywhere you look in Port au Prince there are tents. Every little corner of every neighborhood people are not sleeping in their houses. And when I say tent I don’t mean tent. At that point, a month after the earthquake, many of them were just sheets on four posts. More people have tents now but there are still a lot of people who are sleeping under sheets and when it rains everything gets soaking wet.
Shepherd: Is it because they lost their home or because they are afraid to be inside a building in case another earthquake strikes?
Pomerantz: It’s a combination. There are some claims that 60% of the houses are habitable but people won’t go in them. We work with this small orphanage in the Port au Prince area and the building looked fine. While I was there we had an inspector go in and he said it was fine. There were a few cracks but they weren’t structural.
But the kids will not sleep inside. They’ll go in and out during the day but they won’t sleep inside. We brought tents for them and they’re sleeping in the yard in tents. Last week the yard got flooded and there’s a lot of sewage all around so apparently that got really disgusting and they had to move someplace else. I said, “Why don’t they go back in the house?” But there are all of these aftershocks and people are afraid. I keep on asking people when are you going back into your houses, and my friends say they don’t know.
Shepherd: When you went back to the village, what was it like?
Pomerantz: By the time I went back there were about 800 additional people. They’ve been keeping count because we sent money down for emergencies and relief.
Everyone has lost someone, whether it’s cousins or brothers or more distant relatives. Almost everybody has someone who is a first degree relative that they had lost.
There was one young man who had just moved to Port au Prince in the summer when I was there. He graduated from high school and he was going to go to university. He was the most dramatic change I had seen. He used to be this really energetic, upbeat guy. He would be rapping and dancing. And now he’s walking around with his head hanging down and I went up to him and asked how he’s doing. And he said, “All of these people died, what am I doing still alive?” He said, “I don’t know what to believe in anymore. I can’t believe in anything.” It just takes your breath away. How do you answer that?
This other kid, he had just turned 18, he said, “A friend of mine from the United States just wrote me that the earthquake was because of our sins. What do you think about that?” I said, “This is not a friend of yours. Don’t you listen to him. What could you have possibly done? And what do you think your country has possibly done?” Isn’t that awful? That’s one of those Pat Robertson followers.
Shepherd: How has your mission changed since the earthquake?
Pomerantz: In addition to initially sending down emergency relief money to help feed some of this influx of people, we decided that our organization is not an emergency relief organization but an empowerment organization. So what we’ve tried to do is to create more work projects.
We are now paying people to do work that we had required them to volunteer for. We do a lot of gardening in association with these composting toilets and we say people have to do a day of gardening. Now we’re paying them $3.75 a day or 30 Haitian dollars a day. It’s less than they pay in Port au Prince but it’s more than they would have otherwise and hopefully it will motivate them to not go back to Port au Prince without having some good reason.
We did a project that’s not directly related to our work, but just as a create-work project that they proposed. Pretty much all of the roads there are mud and there were four little paths that are like shortcut areas. They’re wide enough for a car to go through, but they’re really slippery and dangerous. We did a work project on one of them so far to put gravel down.
Shepherd: You’re having a benefit on May 15. How will the donations be used?
Pomerantz: It will definitely go toward more toilets. Since the earthquake, especially, the need in all of the rural areas is so great. The agronomist we’re working with, one of our full-time employees, who we have been able to pay, just completed a study in a large town about an hour away. He did a house-to-house survey on how many people have come into the community and whether the household size increased and what’s their access to toilets. So we’ll have some data and he has located the points where public toilets would be beneficial.
Our organization is small and we have virtually no overhead here. Someday I’d like to be paid but for now everything on this end is volunteer. We pay people in Haiti. Right now we have four projects in progress. It’s very exciting. It’s the first time we’ve had so many going simultaneously or layered on top of each other, four dry toilets in four different places.
I’d like to acknowledge the tremendous support the Milwaukee community has already given. It really has been quite remarkable. We are a small organization but we’ve been working since before the earthquake and we have direct relationships with people in Haiti that will continue long into the future. The work that we’re doing is a hand up not a handout. We’re trying to empower people to do projects and to teach them to be able to do things that are sustainable. Bill Clinton made a statement a few weeks ago that the NGOs’ job should be to put themselves out of business. I agree with that. If we can empower people and figure out a way for this to be sustainable, which is what we’re trying to do with these gardens. A toilet doesn’t stand by itself. We’re trying to have a garden associated with each one so that will create an income and a demonstration for people about how they can do this. And hopefully we will have enough money to keep it going.