News

Haitian assistance group receives international award

Hudson-Catskill Newspapers

COLUMBIA COUNTY — It’s hard to ignore the global catastrophes caused by environmental upsets and the rapid spread of poverty. Nowhere are both of these disasters more apparent than in one of the United States’ nearest neighbors, Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and one in which hundreds of people died, thousands lost their homes and 60 percent of the country’s agriculture was lost in the recent hurricanes.

A local group is doing more than throwing up its hands. The Haitian Community Development Project (HCDP) recently won an international award for its plan to bring a waste incinerator to Haiti. Carline Seide-Murphy and her daughter Marie Jamie traveled to Brussels, Belgium in May to receive the 2007 Energy Globe Award for the HCDP.

The international jury of experts who presented the awards was chaired by Maneka Gandhi, an Indian Parliament member and the former environmental minister of India. There were 853 entries from 109 nations, and the HCDP’s entry was the “honorary national winner for Haiti.”

A waste incinerator may seem an unusual or controversial gift to make to a small, impoverished country, but the explanation can be found in Seide-Murphy’s childhood memories. Garbage, she said, was taken to landfills, but also dropped in the water.

“We’d see condoms, needles, all kinds of things,” she said. “If you keep doing that, the fish die out and the oceans become poisonous. I saw children growing up, their vicinity was a complete waste.”

Seide-Murphy said there are many organizations working on many different environmental projects, such as trees or drinking water.

“But the extent of the garbage that people are swimming into is not something that can be ignored,” she said. “It pains me when I see health organizations talking about providing health care to children, when in fact they send them back to garbage.

“When you have children taking worm pills, and send them back to the garbage, they get reinfected,” Seide-Murphy said. “As they get older, the chemicals in the worm pills will affect the children as well. When you treat kids like that, you can never say what will happen to them. How can you provide good health care to people rolling in filth?”

She met with the mayor of Cite Soleil, an extremely impoverished city of about 300,000 people, on the outskirts of Port au Prince. He told her he has no way of getting rid of the garbage.

“As an island, Haiti doesn’t have room anymore for garbage that doesn’t disappear,” Seide-Murphy said. “Haitians have been recycling since before it was cool. A man walking down the street singing ‘Marchant Bouteille’ checks to see the value of your bottle, gives you coins for them.”

Artists would use discarded pieces of metal and cloth to make art to sell to tourists; many people grew up by the light of kerosene lamps made out of Carnation milk cans.

Used cans were employed for measuring rice, beans, coffee in the marketplace: car bumpers morphed into charcoal stoves and tires became the soles of shoes and sandals.

But now, she said, there are nonrecyclable Styrofoam takeout containers all over the place. Companies sell plastic bags full of water; the bags are thrown in the street or garbage when empty. Things that used to be made out of garbage are now imported.

“People say, ‘We don’t need incinerators; we need zero waste,’” she said. “OK. But what do you do until then?”

The problem with incinerating garbage, of course, is the air pollution it creates.

“If you pass a garbage-burning area, it’s black with smoke,” Seide-Murphy said. “It causes respiratory problems, eye problems.”

Her idea is to sort before burning.

In a school in a poor community, she would put cans of different colors, each color representing either organics, metals, plastics, paper/cardboard or glass. Children will learn to recognize the categories at an early age.

“That’s the project I’d like to develop at the school level, just to bring awareness of it,” she said. “Then bring it to the public.”

She found a company called Inciner8 in Britain that produces a portable, mobile incinerator. According to its Web site, the company’s incinerators burn practically “smoke and smell free.”

The waste management plan for which HCDP won the award includes an education component, with sorting, reusing, and repairing all coming before incinerating.

The small incinerators produced by Inciner8 are preferable because the people don’t have to carry garbage as far to get rid of it, she said.

HCDP needs to raise $3,700 to cover the pilot project of the first incinerator; the price includes transportation from the U.K. to Haiti. It also includes the needed materials; labor; and fuel to start and operate the incinerator. The company is giving the first piece of equipment at cost, and will help to raise additional funds for multiple incinerators after that. It will also train the operators.

Should the project come to realization, “many problems that affect the [people of Haiti] will be minimized,” Seide-Murphy said. “If you don’t clean the water, you can complain about drinking water from now to eternity.”

Seide-Murphy expressed her gratitude to the First Presbyterian Church of Hudson for its help in raising donations.

For more information, contact:

Carline Seide-Murphy, PO Box 35. Niverville, NY 12130, 518-784-4395 or 518-366-2551. Donations may be sent to Haitian Community Development Project, Inc. Waste Incineration Project, Box 744, Valatie, NY 12184.

Reader Comments

Submit a Comment