When Ambassador Charles Rivkin once told a reporter that he wanted to go where no American ambassador had been before, he was referring to low-income, ethnically diverse suburbs of Paris. To Villiers Le Bel, a largely West African community that was partly destroyed by riots in 2007, Rivkin paid a visit to inaugurate a mural of Martin Luther King. After the ambassador’s speech, his delegation sang, “We Shall Overcome.”

Ah, good old US public diplomacy. It has a long history in Europe. But the 21st century has seen a shift, with stepped up outreach into minority — especially Muslim — communities. In France, where the policy is carried out by the cinematic Ambassador Rivkin, it has been very well-received in the immigrant suburbs.

Take, for example, the time Rivkin showed up at a minority-run media outlet with the actor Samuel L. Jackson. “I’m a fervent supporter of this approach,” says Editor Nordine Nabili. “It’s not that I love Americans. It’s that we welcome anyone who wants to see what we do and exchange practices. When the ambassador came with Samuel Jackson, when the representative of the most important power comes and spends two hours here, with all the young people, it’s very important symbolically. It’s validating.”

It’s not just splashy visits. Rivkin and embassy staff have met with community organizations; they’ve invited young leaders, activists and artists to the ambassador’s residence; and they’ve recruited candidates for State Department-funded visits to the US.

The embassy launched the initiative during the Bush administration, after 9/11.

“They had instructions from the State Department saying, ‘Do something Islam, so they did something Islam,” says Gilles Kepel, a French academic and expert on Islam in the Paris suburbs, or banlieues.

He says it was more than anti-Americanism among Muslims that concerned state department officials. “They sort of thought that the French were characterized by a sort of political elite that was non-mixed, that was too white, too male, too old, and that if the country was not more pluralistic, then it would become weaker, and a weaker France was not good as an ally, so they started to reach out to the banlieues.”

Two US diplomatic cables, revealed by Wikileaks, laid this point out in embarrassing clarity. They slammed the French government for failing to integrate minorities into positions of power.

The Embassy in France declined to comment for this story, but it has posted on its website a long list of activities it’s carried out in the suburbs, as well as information on the International Visitors Leadership Program.

Alumni of that program include elites like Francois Hollande, and Nicolas Sarkozy. But it’s been expanded to people like Tara Dickman, the French daughter of South African immigrants. Obama’s former campaign manager recruited her for training in community organizing in Chicago, and that trip inspired her to create a group called the Collective Against Racial Profiling.

“Within a year, police profiling went from a sort of topic that didn’t exist to a major political stake,” she says. “Fourteen people went to court to sue the state, and then it became a major issue in the elections, there are three law proposals now… and this is really thanks to this trip.”

But not everyone is happy with what the US government has been up to in the banlieues. Among the critics is Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, a center-right member of Parliament.

“How will answer the US government if the French government decided to go in some suburbs of the United States to say to the people, ‘You are not very well treated by your government, and we are going to help you. You are going to travel in France, be agent for us.’ It is not acceptable. It is not possible,” Dupont-Aignan says.

And he’s not the only one. Benjamin Pelletier blogs about international cultural influence. He says while the French government is not doing enough to reach out to its minority communities, that doesn’t justify the activism of a foreign power. “What happens when you have a certain segment of the young population that has been influenced by another country acting in its own national interest?” he asks. “Isn’t there a risk of fracturing national cohesion?”

But others say the real problem is that French authorities don’t recognize the potential among suburban, minority youth. Sihame Assbague, a lobbyist for the Collective Against Racial Profiling, says, “We’ve got an Arabic proverb that says, ‘When you want to do something, you find a way. If not, you find an excuse,’ and I think that those who accuse the US to interfere in French affairs, found an excuse.”

Rokhaya Diallo, who went on a State Department trip to the US, says that American diplomats are, of course, acting in their own interest, but at least they’re paying attention. “The ambassador of the US is seen in the suburbs more often than the ministers of our own country,” she says. “Why is that? The US is identifying and courting people, while the French government continues to ignore them.”

Diallo believes the US government has caught on to something important: that a future Monsieur or Madame President may well emerge from one of those diverse, underserved suburbs.

This year the highlight of the festival was World Kora Trio. It is a musical group with Frenchman Jean-Luc DI Fraya, Malian Cherif Soumano and American Eric Longsworth, who together give a modern and funky vibe to traditional instruments.

Longsworth plays the cello. He started playing the traditional cello as a kid in the US.

“At a certain point I realized I really needed to be amplified. I found an electric cello that sounds really good and I’ve been playing that for the last 30 years,” he said.

Eventually, he started getting noticed across the Atlantic.

“I wanted to take a break, and at the same time I was getting more and more invitations to play in France. The idea was to come to France for a year. And that was ten years ago,” he said.

Now he’s part of the World Kora Trio, though Chérif Soumano, of Mali, is the only member who actually plays the kora – the traditional, West African calabash harp.

Longsworth and Soumano met two years ago, in what was almost a very public, high-stakes blind date at a music festival in Rochefort, France.

“The director of the festival suggested even before we had met that we open the festival by playing together in the opening show. And so as soon as we got there, we sat down and started just playing together to see what would happen and just really hit it off. In a sense we experienced the same kind of frustrations growing up as young musicians and wanting to play other music than what we were supposed to be playing, and I think that that’s what makes it possible for us to connect,” Longsworth said.

The duo became a trio with the addition of Jean-Luc Di Fraya, of Marseille, on percussion.

“Jean-Luc is someone I had admired from afar, for many years, and I just really wanted to play with him, and this project with Cherif seemed like exactly the right moment. Very quickly I called Jean-Luc and said, hey, jump on board,” Longsworth said.

Jean-Luc plays a variety of drums such as the djembe, (Tahoka) and the Afro-Peruvian caja – a wooden box that the drummer sits on, an instrument he picked for his performance for Africolor.

He also does vocals.

He tends to sing more sounds than words, but one exception is the song Korazon, also the name of the band’s new album. It’s a play on words: Spanish for heart and for the sound of the kora – Kora Son.

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The front of Rabbi Michel Serfaty’s bus with a sign saying “Jews and Muslims: No to Discrimination.” (Amy Bracken)

Merah and Sidney are extremes but among an alarming number of anti-Semitic attacks across France this year. Most of the assailants have been identified as young Muslim men. So it is in France’s low-income and largely Muslim communities that some religious leaders are campaigning for peace and reconciliation.

That’s why I’m on this rather unusual bus driving through working class suburbs of Paris. The 1970s vehicle is plastered with colorful posters with slogans of peace, and a banner above the windshield saying, “Jews and Muslims: No to Discrimination.”

I can see pedestrians gawking, and that’s the point. A rabbi and an imam are taking this bus on a tour of France. They’re visiting Muslim and Jewish communities to promote mutual understanding. Rabbi Michel Serfaty, the organizer, has been doing this for seven years, and, he says, it’s not getting any easier.

“Jews today live in fear,” he says. “When I tell people I’m going into to this kind of pressure cooker, everyone is afraid for me. Everything goes well, but the reality of the teaching of hatred is incontestable. We’ve been told of children as young as six-years-old who reek of hatred for Jews, reek of anti-Semitism. They learn it from their parents.”

Outside a marketplace, Serfaty and Imam Mohammed Azizi strike up a conversation with a woman in a headscarf. They show her a booklet on customs common to Jews and Muslims. The woman says she gets it, but she’s still upset by the images she sees on TV of what’s happening to the Palestinians. Serfaty urges people to focus on what’s happening in France instead of the Middle East, but the issue keeps coming up.

Sixteen-year-old Jihane Laoui, a Muslim student at a Catholic school, stops to check out the bus. She says she thinks the tour is a good idea because there are tensions among her peers. She says people post things on Facebook about Israel and Palestine and it gets everyone worked up.

Rabbi Michel Serfaty, the organizer of a Muslim-Jewish friendship bus tour in France. (Photo: Amy Bracken)

“The rate of attacks goes up and down depending on what’s happening in the Middle East and on the economic crisis in France,” he says. “In neighborhoods where schools aren’t working and people feel isolated, anti-Semitism develops because Jews are assumed to be at the head of the media, at the head of banks, at the head of power, so people blame the Jews.”

This is a difficult time, according to Sammy Ghozlan, head of France’s National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism. He says anti-Jewish incidents have spiked since the Merah shootings in Toulouse.

“Today,” he says, “Jews avoid going out late, going to certain neighborhoods, wearing yarmulkes.” He says some who share Merah’s extreme views have taken inspiration from him.

In September, masked men threw grenades into a kosher grocery store in the heavily Jewish and Muslim suburb of Sarcelles (north of Paris). One person was injured. Police say a Muslim convert killed in an October raid was implicated in the grenade attack.

On this afternoon, there are plenty of shoppers at the grocery store, and the owner of the kosher market next door says the grenade attack was an isolated incident. “We never have any problems,” he says. “Sometimes there’s some anti-Semitic graffiti about what’s happening with Palestine, but city hall cleans it off pretty quickly.”

Still, some Muslim leaders here are taking steps to counteract the most negative perceptions. Hassen Chalghoumi led a delegation of 17 imams to Israel last month. They met President Shimon Peres and visited the graves of the three children killed by Merah.

“We wanted to show a positive side of France – of diversity, of coexistence, because they don’t know us,” he says. “There are Israelis who think all French Muslims are Merah. I met youths who said to me, ‘You’re all like Merah.’”

Many Muslims in France fear that their fellow Frenchmen think the same thing. One Moroccan shop owner told me the police treat young Muslim men as future Merahs. But while Merah was clearly an extreme case, some see him as a product of his environment. One of his brothers says they were raised to hate Jews.

It’s both a new and an old story, says fashion designer Maud Perl, who runs a boutique in the chic Paris neighborhood of Le Marais. Perl is the great granddaughter of Alfred Dreyfus. That’s Captain Dreyfus, who was jailed on trumped up charges of treason and became a symbol of French anti-Semitism at the turn of the last century.

Perl says when she was a girl, her grandmother told her about Dreyfus. But she really felt a connection to him when Catholic classmates shunned her after they found out she was Jewish. “I was very marked by that experience,” she says.

“I suddenly found myself at the heart of a story that was repeating itself.” And while she says overt anti-Semitism seemed to go away for decades, it resurfaced in 2000, with the Palestinian intifada. “I think we’ve let the situation deteriorate for so long that it will be very difficult to fix it,” she says, “but we absolutely must.”

And that’s why Rabbi Michel Serfaty rides around on an old bus, trying to close the gap between neighbors of different faiths.

But on Friday a Muslim group just outside Paris held what’s billed as the first “gay-friendly” Islamic worship in Europe.

The group also allows men and women to pray together.

The location was kept secret — for security reasons.

The World’s Amy Bracken met the man who launched project.

She said he is a French Muslim who decided to fight for a more inclusive interpretation of Islam after he realized he was gay.

It started as an idea for helping to save Haiti’s beleaguered forests, clean up a filthy Port-au-Prince neighborhood, put people to work, and reduce gang violence. It was an ambitious project, centered on a single, humble product. It was a recycling center in a dense and troubled neighborhood of Port-au-Prince that produced cooking fuel from compressed paper. Hundreds of youths were hired to clean up trash and bring it to the center, where paper waste was processed into briquettes.

The project was set up by the United Nations Development Program, or UNDP. The hope was to offset some of the demand for charcoal made from trees, which was ravaging Haiti’s forests. And it worked, for a while. It even gained international attention from the likes of Bill Clinton.

“This could be done in every neighborhood of Port-au-Prince,” Clinton said of the project at a Haitian Diaspora conference in Miami. “It could be done in every city in Haiti, and if it were successful, it would sweep the poor urban areas of the world. This could be done everywhere.”

I visited the plant in 2010, really just a big warehouse in the Carrefour Feuilles neighborhood. It was bustling with workers pushing wheelbarrows of trash in one end and white paper briquettes the size of hockey pucks out the other.

Two years later, the locked gate tells the story.

Jean Clervil stands in front of the closed factory. (Photo: Amy Bracken)

It’s a common lament here. Vladimir Jean Baptiste ekes out a living making sandals. He says he and his neighbors felt like there was a change in Haiti when they saw the young people working. Now, he says, people are back to begging for money.

No one disputes that the program worked well. The initial goal when it was launched in 2006 was to help tamp down growing gang violence. The UNDP’s Laura Sheridan says it succeeded at that and much more. But she says the economics were always dicey.

“As it went on,” Sheridan says, “it sort of became evident that this is okay for now, we’re paying the wages for these people to work, to clean their community, [which] is very good, but how can that be a long-term solution?”

The hope was that the sale of the paper briquettes and other recycled materials would cover the salaries of the workers. But that didn’t happen. Even with free raw material, the new fuel was just too expensive to compete broadly with dirt-cheap charcoal.

Father Gilbert Peltrop, the headmaster of a local Catholic school, says he’s seen this happen before. He says he remembers when something called “Bip Ti Cheri” came on the market. “It was clean propane gas,” he says, “and it was subsidized, so people could afford it. But then the subsidy ended, and everyone went back to charcoal.”

For a while this time, Peltrop’s school used the recycled paper briquettes to cook students’ lunches. They were a big customer. But since the factory closed, the school has had to go back to charcoal, which doesn’t sit well with Father Peltrop. “It’s the responsibility of both the government and those who want to help Haiti to get together and find a way to provide this service,” Peltrop says.

The UNDP’s Laura Sheridan says the agency still hopes to find a way to revive the project. She says it’s turned the factory over to the government of Port-au-Prince, but the project has been slow to get traction with the city.

“The mayor has changed three times in Port-au-Prince since the start of this year,” Sheridan says, “so we’re following up with them constantly. And if there are any interested partners that would be the mayor’s office that would decide. But for the moment we don’t have the funds, and we don’t have a project team working on it.”

I couldn’t reach anyone from the mayor’s office or the sanitation department to talk about the project. And the Minister of the environment cancelled several scheduled interviews. But Haiti’s former Environment Minister, Yves André Wainright, was willing to speak. He says the recycled paper briquettes and other alternatives to charcoal could be made to work with a simple change in national policy.

Sister Yola Norelus of the St. Gerard School. (Photo: Amy Bracken)

Sister Yola Norelus, an administrator at Saint Gerard School, agrees that the fix really could be that simple. “It’s about means,” she says. “As soon as it’s affordable, everyone will adapt to the new fuel. The briquettes are better for them.”

It seems that just about everyone agrees that the community-based recycling program to produce the new cooking fuel was a great idea, which helped address many problems at once. What seems to be eluding decision-makers is how to make it last.

UN police officers are taking a break outside their office at the police academy in Port-au-Prince. Mian Georges, of Benin, is among the thousands of UN personnel from Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa, who’ve participated in missions in Haiti in recent decades. But Georges says for Africans, the connection to Haiti is unique.

“We are practically connected by umbilical cord to Haiti,” he says. “Our histories are common. Our cultures too. When I came to Haiti, it was basically the same food… I feel like I’m back home in Africa.”

And Georges’ country, Benin, has a special link with Haiti. It was a Beninois, Toussaint Louverture, who led Haiti’s successful rebellion against the French at the end of the 18th century. That established Haiti as a symbol of black independence.

So to many Africans and Haitians, the idea of Haiti becoming a member of the African Union seems natural.

Last July, at the African Union summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Haiti’s communication minister Ady Jean-Gardy moved to make it official.

“We’re already in the Organization of American States,” he says. “We have a representative at the European Union, and we think we should be in the African Union.”

Jean-Gardy an AU membership could lead to economic exchanges geared toward development, and inclusion in African trading blocs.

The AU postponed a decision on Haiti’s inclusion in the union until January 2013. But Africa appears poised to let Haiti into the fold.

“We have always been advocates for Haiti, throughout Africa,” he says.

Babacar M’Bow is from Senegal. He’s a cultural consultant with a focus on Haiti. And he’s been pushing for Haiti to be let into the AU.

“Our parents were advocates for Haiti,” he says, “so we inherited this charge.”

To many Africans, there is a sense of indebtedness to Haiti because Haiti has been an advocate for Africa. When Haiti was the only black member of the United Nations, it pushed for the liberation of Africa from colonial rule.

Haiti also enjoys a level of prestige in African countries that it doesn’t have closer to home.

Babacar M’Bow says he grew up in Senegal surrounded by Haitian professors and artists.

And the Democratic Republic of Congo has welcomed waves of Haitian professionals.

Jean-Junior Joseph served as communications chief for Haiti’s prime minister a few years ago. Then he went to Congo for a similar position.

He says, “The prime minister spoke to me on different occasions, and said, ‘what can we do for you?’ They always think we belong to them. They think, ‘well they shipped you over there. Now come back to us.’”

After the 2010 earthquake, the Democratic Republic of Congo, aid dependent itself, pledged to donate 2.5 million dollars to Haiti. And Senegal’s president flew 150 Haitian students to Dakar to attend university for free there.

Small-scale exchanges have also been happening.

Earlier this year, Port-au-Prince resident Baudeler Magloire flew to Benin on a National Geographic travel grant to share his expertise in composting toilets with organizations there. And he was struck by how connected people there seemed to feel to his country.

He says, “When I said I was Haitian, they said, ‘Yeah, Haitians are our brothers.’ Most people know the history of Haiti, they learn it in school, and there are people who worked in Haiti.’”

And while many here in Haiti believe their country is essentially African, their understanding of what Africa is is more complicated. To some, it is where they go after they die. Others think it is a single country. And it gets worse in some circles, according to M’Bow, who visits Haiti often.

“Most Haitians are ignorant of Africa,” he says. “If you want to insult somebody, you will call him an African, ‘Look at an African!’… it is a derogatory term, and it highlights that ignorance… So there is work to be done.”

M’Bow says there’s also work to be done if Haiti wants to joint the AU.

“If Haiti is a member of the African Union,” he says, “all bets are off. Haiti is subject to analysis and criticism as any other member state of the union.”

In other words, the Haiti-Africa relationship would have to develop beyond symbolism and shared history.

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The priest had expelled a reporter during a Mass because he had criticized the president, and the HJA’s mission was to show they stood together and they wouldn’t be cowed.     

We stood atop the front steps and outside the massive closed doors of the church waiting for the priest to appear. Being so new to Haiti, everything was confusing, and while somewhat frightened by the counter-demonstration forming on the street below, even more intimidating to me was this solid, grand, church that loomed over us and the town’s main square, even when a relatively small priest emerged in an ‘I (heart) Jesus’ baseball cap, said a few words, and disappeared.

For the next nine years, I never returned to Léogane. I often passed it on the road heading southwest of the capital but never took the turnoff – even after the town was devastated by the January 2010 earthquake. But during my last trip a few weeks ago, I drove there with some friends to check out the celebration of the day of the town’s patron saint, Rose de Lima – also the name of the church.

We arrived as the sun was setting and asked where the ‘fete champetre’ (country festival) was, imagining dancing through the streets.

It was explained to us that the party was another day, but the day was solely a dawn-to-dusk service at the church.

One of the friends with me was Makenson Remy, a radio journalist whom I had met at that HJA event nine years ago. The service was to be held at the same church, the only Catholic church in town, right on the main square.

Yet somehow, in spite of repeatedly getting directions, we could not find the place. We rolled up and down the uneven streets, following finger points and wrist waves toward what seemed like nothing, until we finally realized that what we were looking for didn’t really exist any more.

What everyone referred to simply as ‘the church’ was nothing but a tile floor – now functioning as a parking lot, an altar, and, on the ground behind it, a large church bell. The town square before it was lined with a tall, corrugated metal fence, and around it stood once stately buildings in various states of destruction.

The service was being held in tents, some marked ‘UN’, and when it came to an end, scores of beautifully dressed men, women and children picked up their chairs and cleared out, breezing past the repaired church bell, which sat awkwardly on the ground, and the altar, looking unjustly neglected with its gilded mosaic designs, as Sri Lankan peacekeepers leapt into action, disassembling and folding up the tents.

When I got home, I looked up the church and found that it had been built in 1710, but then I read something elsewhere that seemed contradictory: In August 2010, seven months after the earthquake that destroyed it, the church turned 500-years-old. Not only could the church not be 500-years-old if it no longer existed, but it could not be 500-years-old because it was not built in the 1500s.

Clearly what I was reading used ‘église’ (church) to mean ‘paroisse’ (parish). Still, a parish in Haiti that existed in the 1500s, long before independence and the abolition of slavery?

Haiti’s founding father, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, was married at this altar in 1801, but going back even further, what is now Leogane, it turns out, was once the capital of a Taino chiefdom that covered most of what is now Haiti. At the time this church was built, Spanish missionaries were wreaking havoc on what was then Hispaniola, spreading smallpox while trying to convert Tainos to Catholicism. A few years after the parish was created, the Spanish began bringing enslaved Africans to the island.

It seemed a sad story of the triumph of the wicked, that the people who killed off the native population and enslaved the ancestors of modern-day Haitians created a parish that serves as a hub for the community even when its infrastructure is gone.

But maybe it’s about something modern and positive emerging from an inevitably painful past. Several years ago, a priest decided that the church saint’s day should be separated from the accompanying street parties, so those were moved to a later date.   I hear they’re a lot of fun and very Haitian – that is, so independent of infrastructure as to survive disease, conversion, slavery, and a massive earthquake.

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Nearly three years later, about 400,000 remain homeless. Many are still living in tent camps. And they’re at risk of eviction.

But these days, there’s some push-back.

On a recent Sunday morning outside of Port-au-Prince, impeccably dressed men, women and children file into the huge Grace Church. But across the lawn, a corrugated metal fence hides a different scene — several hundred tents and makeshift shelters.

This is Grace Village camp. No one here attends the church next door.

They’re angry about the horrible conditions here. They’re especially angry at the landlord, the church pastor, who’s been trying to get them off his property.

A church representative says they’re just evicting trouble-makers and trying to help those with some means to relocate.

But many camp residents say the pastor and his associates are using sinister tactics.

Frantsy Alexandre emerges from a tent with a large manila envelope. He pulls out an x-ray of his torso and a signed letter on medical stationery.

He says, “The camp manager was going to destroy my neighbor’s tent, so I said, ‘You can’t do that’ and blocked his way… He came back with a security guard and beat me with a baton. I went to the police but they ignored me.”

So Alexandre went to the courthouse, where they told him to document his injuries.

“I talked to an evicted camp resident who’s been fighting this kind of abuse,” he says, “and he said we need to report what happens to the attorney.”

The attorney is Patrice Florvilus. After the earthquake, he formed an organization that represents residents of tent camps who’ve been threatened with eviction.

“Our strategy is to stop evictions by making landlords follow the law,” Florvilus says, “which can mean a lengthy legal process. And that’s what the landlord wants to avoid.”

This doesn’t always work, but a legal defeat can sometimes turn into a de facto victory. In one case, the mayor of Delmas ordered families off government land. A court upheld the eviction order. But then the mayor backed off – locals say because of organized opposition.

But there are also a lot of failures.

Jackson Doliscar is a community organizer who says getting people to believe in the power of grassroots activism has been a major challenge. In 1990, when Jean-Bertrand Aristide made his successful bid for president, he encouraged Haitians to organize for change. But the hoped-for improvements didn’t materialize. Doliscar thinks that people in Haiti today are desperate enough to try again.

“When things are more difficult for people,” he says, “like they’re having problems with the landlord, they say, ‘If I don’t join the organization today, I’ll be thrown out.’ So they join the organization.”

After the earthquake, Doliscar’s grassroots group joined forces with 25 others to form a housing rights coalition. One of their projects is a slum called Jalousie. It’s in a precarious spot on a hillside overlooking the city. This summer the government ordered residents to evacuate.

Government officials deny they ever planned to force Jalousie residents from their homes. They have been encouraging hundreds to leave, in exchange for money to relocate. But many fear being homeless again after spending more than a year living in the streets after the earthquake.

Marie Michel Moise lived in a tent in a city park with her young children for more than two years. She says she finally got funds to move into a tin shack in Jalousie, the only neighborhood she could afford. When I ask her where she would live if she had the choice, she laughs at the idea. “If you don’t work in this country,” she says, “you don’t have a choice.”

And yet Moise says she believes people can make a difference by taking to the streets and pressuring the government. I ask if she’s afraid she’ll be forced to leave, and she shakes her head. “No,” she says. “We had a demonstration, and they said they wouldn’t destroy our homes.”

But things aren’t quite that easy. Even some supporters of Haiti’s housing rights movement say popular protests are no silver bullet.

Alexis Erkert works with Other Worlds, an organization of women that supports grassroots groups around the globe. She says Haitian authorities often dismiss the activists.

“Last time they did have a sit-in, they managed to get a meeting with [a Ministry of Social Affairs staff member],” she says, “but then they asked for an email address or phone number for follow-up, and they were just laughed at and kicked out.”

I ask if she thinks the movement can succeed. “Not without the international solidarity piece,” she says.

In other words, If Haitian officials won’t listen to Port-au-Prince’s poorest, they might pay attention to their overseas allies, at least those in donor countries.

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The sound of peeping frogs is all that penetrates the darkness on a recent night in Haiti’s Parc La Visite. The national park is barely 15 miles from Port-au-Prince, but it feels a world away from Haiti’s crowded and crumbling capital. More than a mile high, clouds wrap around a mountainside, shrouding pine groves, broad leaf forests, waterfalls and caves.

It’s hard to imagine this peaceful and remote setting as the frontline of a battle. But since president Michel Martelly began his new environmental protection effort, that’s literally what it’s become.

Mareluse Nord is one of several hundred Haitians who live in the park.

“They came and said, ‘Don’t you recognize that you have been asked to leave?’” she recounts of the day this summer when the police tried to evict her and her neighbors. “I said, ‘yes, we’re ready to leave, but we need somewhere to go.’ They said they’d give us [$1,200], but I said that can do nothing for us. We protested, and the police fired teargas. We threw rocks, and they shot bullets. They destroyed our houses and killed four people.”

The violence was part of an aggressive crackdown on squatters in the park. But the residents resisted in part because it has never been made clear who can be here and what they can do. Even the boundaries of the park itself are undefined.
People have been living on this land since at least the 1930s. The area was declared a national park, and residents were ordered to leave in the 1980s, but that order was never enforced.

Seventy-five-year-old Emmanuel Xavier insists he has title to his land, granted in 1942. And he says that’s about all his family has.

“We’ve been here for three generations. Now the state comes and kicks me off the land… me, a landowner and elderly resident,” he says. “This little sickle and that little wheel are what allow us to eat and drink. Besides that, there is nothing but the earth we work.”

The anger runs deep among the park’s residents. But at least some of its neighbors are happy to see their government finally try to protect the park.

Heavy rains come often here this time of year. And whenever they do, Winthrop Attie fears floods and landslides will follow. Attie runs an inn on land just below the park. He says those living up the hill are destroying the land and drinking water of everyone below them by growing crops, defecating, burying their dead, and cutting trees in the watershed.

He says, “Haiti has become like a sandcastle, melting at every rainfall, because people are doing things everywhere, as they want. It’s total anarchy.”

Haitian president has promised to step up protection of the national park, but the residents there are resisting the efforts. (Photo: Amy Bracken)

“How can you compare 500, 600 people to 4 million people?” he says. “These people have to move from the watersheds. It’s not about abusing poor peasants. It’s about restoring some order and harmony in the country.”

Attie says president Martelly is the first national leader to make protecting the environment a priority, and he’s very glad to see it.

But some question whether the government’s get-tough approach in the park is really about protecting the environment and the common interest.

Yves Andre Wainright served as Haiti’s Minister of the Environment under three previous presidents. He says the actions of the current administration are inconsistent.

“When the state decided to remove people from the watershed, it created all kinds of suspicions,” he says. “The park boundaries have not been identified, and there are other zones that are very rich and important and on which the state is silent. I’ve identified eight water sources in the area. So why remove people from just one source and not the seven others?”

The park fight has touched yet another nerve in Haiti’s longstanding rift between rich and poor. And it isn’t the only flashpoint among the government’s new environmental initiatives.

There’s conflict over a crackdown on dumping trash in Port-au-Prince’s streets and canals and over a new ban on the sale of some plastic bags.

But so far the battle over Parc La Visite is rousing the most passion… and has the highest stakes.

A park resident says there have been no further negotiations on clearing the park since this summer’s violence, but government spokesman Ady Jean-Gardy says the eviction effort will continue.

“We have allowed destruction of the environment to go on for too long,” he says. “Now people are angry because of the unfortunate incident in the park, but all will be resolved through dialogue. And I think we also need to educate the squatters.”

Jean-Gardy says some squatters might be offered environmental protection jobs in the park while the rest are moved out. But residents say they won’t move until they’re given new places to live and reparations for the killings.

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Then the crowd parts, and a beautiful young woman – fully clothed – struts to the front, pushes a rapper out of the way, and begins to sing.

Eunide Edouarin, aka Princess Eud, is relatively small but she commands attention, her voice strong but easy, a sly smile spreading across her face.

“I just got out of my head any notion that girls don’t rap or whatever, and I did what I needed to do,” says Princess Eud.

She grew up in a poor neighborhood on a hillside overlooking Port-au-Prince. She was one of seven children. She sang in church, and then joined a neighborhood rap group, followed by several bands including the group Mystik 703. Then she went solo, pairing up mostly with fellow 703 member, Ded Krezi.

Her growing fame at home led to invitations to play overseas, in Cuba and Japan. No matter that she raps in Creole.

“After the show in Cuba, I’d be walking down the street,” she says. “I had been doing a song called ‘y ap pale’ [they’re talking], and everyone on the street would say ‘y ap pale!’ when they saw me. Japan too. They had no idea what I was saying, but they really liked us. So overseas we have had a lot of success.”

Eud is now working on her first solo album, combining rap with a variety of other styles, to show off her range.

To Carel Padre, a radio and TV personality who hosts music competitions, Eud has enormous potential. But he isn’t crazy about her recent shift from socially conscious lyrics to more typical topics, such as love and celebrity rivalry.

“She’s really talented, beautiful, she has a swag, she just needs good music,” he says. “I can say that Eud is the only great female rapper that we have. She’s the queen of Haitian rap. When you’re thinking about female mc in Haiti, hers is the only name that comes up.”

Actually she’s not the only one.

There is another popular Haitian female rapper, maybe less polished but just as powerful.

Jean Cylien Marie Innocent, aka Captain J. Ruff made a splash in 2006, when Wyclef Jean held a hip-hop competition in her Port-au-Prince neighborhood Belair. The theme: cleaning up the streets.

Of the 12 finalists, she was the only woman.

Jean Cylien Marie Innocent, aka Captain J. Ruff (Photo: Amy Bracken)

Her rapping focused on Belair, the violence but also the positive energy and the artists that have emerged from the neighborhood.

Like Eud, J Ruff is working on her first solo album. She recorded some in Rio and some in New York, and she’s living in a quieter neighborhood above town, but she hasn’t forgotten where she came from.

The name of the album: “Belair stand up.”

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Haiti sent a number of athletes to the Olympics this year, but only one – a Judo fighter – actually lived and trained in Haiti. The reason, of course, is the lack of resources and infrastructure. But some see opportunity in the absence of infrastructure – or at least the lack of paved roads.

Registration has opened for an elite international mountain bike race being planned for January 2013. It will cover about 80 miles and involve some 10,000 feet of climbing, on some steep, rocky, harrowing terrain.

The brainchild of the race, Philip Kiracofe flew to Haiti from his home in New York following the 2010 earthquake. He volunteered in the hardest-hit town, Leogane, but decided there was a better way to help.

“The thing that Haiti needs is people spending money. So the idea that someone would go down in Haiti and have a great time is exactly the point. The Dominican republic, the neighboring country on the island, generates 14 percent of its GDP from tourism. Haiti has none.

Tourism – specifically off-the-beaten-track adventure tourism – seemed a solution. So Kiracofe founded Mountain Bike Ayiti and began planning the Haiti Ascent Stage Race.

“The original idea for MTB Ayiti was just a bike race; bring some racers down and you have a multi-day stage race, and then they go home. But it evolved into a six-day five-night race, wrapped in a cultural immersion experience. And so we realized we have a captive audience of some of the best mountain bikers in the world and some amateur bikers,” Kiracofe said.

The idea is to get them to fall in love with Haiti. That is: Have them do some work on trails, buy handicrafts, hear live music, and come back every year.

I met with some of the local organizers, members of a cycling club, at the beginning of the course, in front of the remains of the National Palace in downtown Port-au-Prince. And then, almost immediately, we began the seemingly endless ascent by truck, through the city and into the suburbs, villages, farmland, on an increasingly challenging road offering increasingly dramatic vistas. And a welcome drop in temperature.

Not only have none of these men ever been on a mountain bike. This is a really hard course. If the steepness and rocks don’t get you, the winding razor’s-edge roads with terrifying vertical drops might.

Mountain biking in Haiti (Photo: Mountain Bike Ayiti/Facebook)

Jonas Ronald heads the Leogane Cycling Club. He says a big part of the race’s appeal is the exposure – and resources – intended to along with it. There is no bike shop in Haiti. Ronald and other cyclists have to ask friends overseas to purchase and bring them bikes. Then they fix and maintain them themselves.

“It’s very difficult for Haitians to cycle at this level,” Ronald said. “We want to partner with foreigners so we can open a bike shop here, to sell bikes, rent bikes, and take people on bike tours.”

This is exactly what Mountain Bike Ayiti is planning to do. But the hope for help goes well beyond these bikers. After two hours of driving the course, our car will go no further. We get out and walk.

A small store is opening on the roadside, and Rosemene Joseph is setting up a table of undergarments and toiletries for sale. It’s hard to imagine how she would benefit from cyclists racing past her business, but she sees it differently.

“It’s a good thing,” she said in Creole, “because when a foreigner comes here there’s a lot they could do. There’s a lack of schools and we don’t have a health center nearby.”

Henristal Rimitil, an elderly farmer, chimes in.

“I’m really happy, because when they come they’ll see all the problems we have, how poor we are.”

Residents here are oblivious to the hordes of NGOs that descend on the capital and other parts of the country. This might explain their hopes for what the race might do. Tour experts say this is part of the beauty of adventure tourism. It reaches a remote population, and shows foreigners a different face of the country. This is why Cyril Pressoir, a Port-au-Prince-based tour operator, is on board.

“We’re tired of the face that we’re served constantly and it doesn’t reflect reality. The reality of Haiti is so complex. I’m all for mountain biking or any other type of adventure sports, anything that can get people to come to Haiti with an open eye, love Haiti, and become ambassadors,” Pressoir said.

Oh, and the race ends in the southern beach city of Jacmel, just in time for the city’s wild and creative Carnival. The bikers simply can’t escape without a good dose of the landscape and vivacious Haitian culture.

Now it’s frighteningly easy to forget. The government and international NGOs moved people out of the most visible places, by handing out cash or housing assistance. Earlier this summer, Champs de Mars, the city’s main square, was cleared of its hundreds of post-quake inhabitants in time for the president to organize a massive Carnaval there. It made up for the cancellation of the regular spring Carnaval, which was impossible because of the homeless inconveniently set up right where the celebration would have taken place.

Haiti’s president and government clearly recognize the psychological, economic, and political importance of offering free entertainment, and for Port-au-Prince residents to have their parks back. Now the giant national palace, slumped and deflated since the earthquake like a slain dragon, is being demolished. There is much to be said for boosting people’s spirits by clearing away the constant reminders of the suffering caused by the unspeakably horrific tragedy of 2010. But there are also potential consequences.

The approach of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Isaac made Haitians and the international community turn their attention, at least for a moment, back to the most vulnerable. As the storm approached, official addresses and public service announcements aired repeatedly on radio stations calling on Haitians to remember the elderly and the handicapped and to exhibit solidarity.

One announcement concluded, ‘One for all, and all for one,’ in an odd twist on Haiti’s motto: L’Union Fait La Force, there is strength in unity. And local and foreign journalists asked how people still living in tents would survive the storm’s heavy winds and torrential rain.

On Saturday morning, after a sleepless night (even for those of us in secure, solid housing), for the first time after arriving here two weeks ago, I began visiting camps.

Two of them were in Carrefour, the crowded and largely chaotic city on the western edge of Port-au-Prince. The first one, Camp Marine, on the main road outside the Coast Guard station, was full of tiny make-shift shelters with now muddy earthen floors, damp beds, and rain still dripping through many spots of the tarp ceilings. Some families had fled overly wet shacks to squeeze in with neighbors in equally cramped but slightly dryer structures.

They simply had no better refuge. Everyone I spoke with had lost the homes they rented in the earthquake, are now unemployed, and simply have no means to find housing.

At the next camp, Grace Village, the situation was even worse. It took some time to find the place because it was off a side road and the main gate was locked shut. We entered a back way, through a winding road, a rushing stream, muddy ground, and another gate. Many of the hundreds of shelters had collapsed from the wind and rain, one crushed by a falling tree, but everyone was talking about the death of a baby in the night.

A young mother’s nine-month-old baby had fallen ill. An emergency vehicle was summoned but wasn’t able to enter because the nearby gate was locked and no one had the key – no one but the property owner. The vehicle came around the long way, and the baby died.

There’s no knowing what the fate of the baby would have been had the gate opened, but no matter, camp residents were livid.

‘They’re imprisoning us!’ people kept yelling, pointing toward the closed gate. On the one hand, they were shut in; on the other, resident upon resident made the same claim: the property owner was trying to drive them out by making life there as miserable as possible – by sending police in to arrest people and force them out into the street, and reportedly sending thugs in to beat people up and destroy the toilets and solar street lamps NGOs had set up. They were deprived of basic services, such as food and water, and of the right to move about freely.

Who is this landowner? A pastor, who reportedly initially welcomed earthquake victims to the grounds of his ‘Grace Village’ but then decided he had had enough.

Macsonne Polyte, a city council member who visits the camp regularly, called the situation an outrage.

“Haitian law says you cannot mistreat people,” he said, referring to Haiti’s constitutional guarantee of decent housing for all of its citizens. But, he added, “the law of the pastors says you must mistreat people,” an allusion to allegations that the pastor is doing all he can to make life unbearable for the squatters.

But Polyte later acknowledged that this situation is really a failure of the state. “You look at the condition people are living in. You know how many thousands were spent on the various Carnavals all over the country?”

I was unable to reach the pastor or anyone who could defend him, but whatever the politics of Grace Village – the who paid who to do what, and the who has the right to what land – it remains a scandal that hundreds of men, women, children and babies are living in this kind of unbearable squalor behind closed gates, out of site and out of mind.

According to the latest figures from the International Organization for Migration, almost 400,000 Haitians are still homeless, and often there is no sign of efforts to make their lives any better.

It’s weakening somewhat, which is good news for those attending the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

Still, it hit Haiti pretty hard over the weekend.

Anchor Marco Werman speaks with The World’s Amy Bracken who is in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman, this is The World. Tropical storm Isaac gained some strength as it churned over the Gulf of Mexico today. It’s expected to touch down late tomorrow somewhere between Louisiana and the Floriday panhandle as a category 2 hurricane. The governors of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama have all declared states of emergency. Today, the storms outer bands drenched Tampa, FL, where the Republican National Convention is on hold for one day. We’ll go to that rather damp convention later in the show to talk about the GOP’s immigration platform. First though, we turn to Haiti which was hit by tropical storm Isaac over the weekend. The World’s Amy Bracken is in Port au Prince. Amy, how did Haiti fair with Isaac? I’m thinking in particular the hundreds of thousands of Haitians who are still living in tent camps after losing their homes in that devastating 2010 earthquake.

Amy Bracken: Well, it’s a mixed report so far. There were expectations that it would really hit the south badly and not so much the rest of the country. But it’s been surprising how much it has affected most of the country. It didn’t hit Port au Prince as badly as some other places, but Port au Prince is where you have an enormous homeless population. There’s some 400,000 people still homeless from the earthquake, so of course they were pretty severely affected by the storm.

Werman: I mean what is it like those camps when heavy rains like Isaac start to fall?

Bracken: There’s some places that I visited on the outskirts of Port au Prince where during the night of the storm there were tents that were blown down. There were tents that were flooded, but what people were really concerned about in one camp was the fact that a child had died over night. It wasn’t actually due to the storm itself, but there was a baby who was sick and there was no humanitarian groups or emergency groups that were able to get in to rescue the child. The gate was locked and nobody was able to find the key to get out or to get the emergency people in. This was part of this ongoing dispute between the residents of the camp and the land owner. There are a number of cases where people are living on private land and the land owner just is tired of them living there and is trying to push them off, so this is the way that things are being dealt with in some areas. I mean I think there are a lot of aid agencies that are out working very hard at trying to help people, but of all the camps that I visited I haven’t seen any evidence of basic services being provided.

Werman: Well given how shaky the infrastructure is, I was gonna ask you know, a government official said today that the death toll just from tropical storm Isaac is 19 people dead. Obviously, 19 too many, but were people there surprised the toll wasn’t a lot higher?

Bracken: Yes, I mean certainly in Haiti it could’ve been much, much worse. And there was a lot more communication from the government this time around than there has been in the past. People were ordered to stay home and so that might have reduced the number. Of course, it’s still early and there probably are people, or maybe people that haven’t been counted. I mean I went to a Doctors Without Borders emergency room and they said no, we haven’t seen an increase of people coming in, but of course, there are no buses or taxis out. So, and there aren’t a lot of emergency vehicles. So if people were in trouble, chances are they wouldn’t be coming in.

Werman: Haitians in Port au Prince are clearly angry, as you say, that government services aren’t functioning, what is their mood right now dealing with yet another blow from Mother Nature?

Bracken: I noticed when I came back to Port au Prince a few weeks ago that people just seem really fed up with their living situation to start with. And to have something like this, it’s not so much the storm as the fact that they’re just not getting help, I meant it’s just extraordinary that more than 2-1/2 years after the earthquake and people just can’t understand why real decent housing hasn’t been setup for people.

Werman: The World’s Amy Bracken speaking with us from Port au Prince, Haiti where the rain has stopped and people are starting to pick up the pieces after tropical storm Isaac. Amy, thank you and take care.

Bracken: Thank you, Marco.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Its white dome sunk into the base of the building and the palace became an icon and metaphor for the country’s perennial political troubles after the 2010 earthquake.

Now, the palace is going to be demolished by the aid agency started by actor Sean Penn.

Anchor Marco Werman talks to reporter Amy Bracken, who is in Port-au-Prince.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: Haiti is braced for a long night tonight. Heavy rains and winds from tropical storm Isaac will be battering the flood-pro nation well into tomorrow morning. Haiti has seen more than its share of natural disasters. Hundreds of thousands are still living in makeshift camps after the devastating 2010 earthquake. One of the most recognizable images from that quake was Haiti’s National Palace in Port-Au-Prince. Its white central domes sunk into the base of the building. Now the palace is to be demolished by the aid agency created by actor Sean Penn. Amy Bracken is Haiti for the World. Earlier today we caught up with her in front of the presidential palace. Is it news Amy that the ruin palace is going to be demolished or is it”¦who is actually going to do the demolishing?

Amy Bracken: It depends on who you talk to. Some people are very angry that it’s Americans who are going to do the demolishing or lead the demolishing. That would surely employ Haitians to do the job. Other people, they say all they care about is the fact that it’s going to be demolished. They don’t care who does it. They just want it done it soon.

Werman: Now the National Palace was grand by any measure, built in a boussard [sp] style, several domes, columns. When was it built?

Bracken: It was actually built a century ago. In 1912 there was a competition of architects, Haitians and French architects. Haitian architects won the competition, designed it. It was being built when there was a coup. This was during a period of series of coups. The president was assassinated and the National Palace was burnt down, most of it was burnt down in the process of being built. The US took advantage of the instability in Haiti and moved in and began their occupation of the country. So it was actually under the US occupation that the palace was rebuilt, or that the building process continued.

Werman: Given its colonial style and its colonial connections, was the palace something that the Haitians were proud of? Is anyone upset that it’s going to be demolished?

Bracken: It actually is something that people were very proud of. I think it’s a symbol of Haitian pride, even if it’s sort of a colonial style. It was a Haitian architect. Even if it was rebuilt or built by Americans originally it’s still a symbol of Haitian strength. People talk about the earthquake decapitating the country. I mean it was these major government buildings that were destroyed, and a lot of them were very grand and beautiful. Port-Au-Prince is surrounded by mountains. If you go in any of the suburbs by some of the neighborhoods, you look down on the city and the National Palace is the first thing you see. And there are a lot of people hanging around, the parks that surround the National Palace, and it’s very visible from so many angles. And it’s just upsetting for people to see this on a daily basis.

Werman: What’s going to replace the presidential palace?

Bracken: Nobody knows. It’s a mystery what’s going to replace it, who will design the replacement, who will build the replacement, and when it will happen. As far as just the demolition, they said a couple of days ago that it was going to begin anywhere in the next ten days. And it’s interesting to see the anticipation. There are a lot of people hanging around the palace just looking to see what’s happening. And they’ve spotted some members of Sean Penn’s organization, but who knows how long it’s going to take. Estimates range from a couple of months to three months, and everybody knows that in Haiti things can take much, much longer than expected.

Werman: Given how ramshackle the building currently is, with tropical storm Isaac coming through Haiti, is there a chance that that could topple the palace even further?

Bracken: I think that isn’t much concern about toppling the palace. I think that the much greater concern is the much more humble homes on slippery mountain sides around Port-Au-Prince and much more concern about homes in the south. Haiti is the most mountainous country in the Caribbean and extremely environmentally devastated. So it just means that even a small tropical storm in direct hit can cost thousands of lives. Fortunately, disaster preparedness has improved quite a bit in recent years, so there are lot of shelters that have been setup around the south as well as in Port-Au-Prince. And so many people are connected by cell phones now who weren’t a few years ago. A lot of members of the government in international community are involved in educating people.

Werman: Amy Bracken in Haiti for The World. Thank you so much Amy, good to speak.

Bracken: Thanks so much Marco.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Truittier trash heap (Photo: Amy Bracken)

The village of Truittier, on the northern edge of Port-au-Prince, has a certain charm. Pigs snort and fowl cluck amid vegetable gardens and cactus hedges lining dirt paths. But the village’s raison d’etre lies in plain sight – piles of sorted trash in almost every yard. Truittier exists because it’s next to the city dump, where residents scavenge for recyclable materials.

It was never pleasant living here, but things have gotten much worse since last year’s earthquake. Truittier resident Gerald Desrosier points toward a pond at the dump. “They empty toilets over there,” he says. “Right over there.”

Every day, a stream of trucks empties hundreds of portable toilets into the pond. The toilets serve the million-plus displaced people living in camps around Port-au-Prince, which has no sewage treatment plant.

Elsewhere across Haiti, millions of people don’t even have toilets. Even before the earthquake, there was said to be only one toilet for every 1,000 Haitians. And the country’s poor sanitation system has contributed to chronic public health problems and deadly cholera outbreaks, like the one that ravaged Haiti last fall.

Here in Truittier there have been all kinds of health problems related to the waste, Desrosier says. And residents have to smell it when the wind blows toward the village. Desrosier‘s neighbor, Joseph Eguens, says there have been demonstrations against the dumping, but that nothing’s been done.

The aid groups that run the camps say they’re not happy with the dumping location, either. But other organizations are trying to keep sewage from being dumped at all, anywhere.

Nick Prenata of SOIL (Photo: Amy Bracken)

The canal is a reeking mass of trash and human waste. It’s even worse in the rainy season, when it sometimes overflows and the raw sewage floods into people’s homes.

SOIL is trying to help change that – and change the way Haitians think about their waste. After the earthquake, a local group asked SOIL to help set up a sanitation system here in Cite Soleil. It would be based not on porta-potties, or even a municipal sewer, but on composting toilets.

Cite Soleil’s composting toilets have separate removable compartments for urine and solid waste. Instead of flushing, users throw in sugar cane scraps from a local rum factory to cover the waste and start the composting process. Prenata says the five composting toilets at this site are used by an estimated 100 people a day. When they fill up, volunteers haul the waste off to a nearby site for what’s called thermophilic composting.

“If you get it right, the temperature gets really hot,” Prenata says. “The microorganisms eating through the feces and the carbon generate a lot of heat.” That kills off pathogens like E. coli and the cholera bacteria. Diseases avoided, wastewater problem solved.

And there’s another key benefit. What’s left after the composting process is a nutrient-rich organic fertilizer. Which is why experts say the simple technology is an innovative way to deal with two major problems at once—Haiti’s sanitation crisis and its soil fertility crisis.

Over centuries of land mismanagement, Haiti has lost much of its topsoil, and so its ability to feed itself. At the same time, it’s been dumping millions of pounds of potential soil nutrients into landfills and waterways, where they become a serious problem.

“So you have this issue of human waste treatment, and you have this issue of agricultural depletion,” says Brown University ecology professor Stephen Porder. “How you produce enough food for undernourished populations, and how you do that while solving water quality problems that lead to tremendous illness?” Porder says composting toilets, also known as ecological sanitation, are part of the answer, and a growing number of people in Haiti agree, including some in the Haitian government.

Paul Christian Namphy, a Haitian-American engineer who once worked with SOIL and is now an advisor for Haiti’s new water and sanitation agency, says ecological sanitation is the future. Namphy says that along with solving immediate problems, ecological sanitation increases people’s awareness of the realities of sanitation, and how communities can take charge of their own problems.

Certainly the idea is catching on in Cite Soleil, where the waste from the new composting toilets is already being put to work in a community vegetable garden. Agronomist Archibald Miracle, who manages the garden, says the compost generated here lets community to do completely organic farming. “It allows people to create their own little economy, when otherwise they would have to go to the market,” Miracle says.

Backers hope the Cite Soleil ecological sanitation project will be a model for Haiti and elsewhere. They say their biggest concern is finding a sustainable financing model to operate and expand the effort. More than a year after the earthquake, project organizers say donor fatigue has set in, and that the task ahead is largely to convince potential supporters that ecological sanitation systems are worth their investment.

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