Our First Guest Blog Post: Sustaining Haiti

Hey Guys,

We have our first guest post! It's from Zach Christensen, last year's club Historian. He's currently in Uganda this semester doing research for Professors Findley and Nielson (cool, eh?) but he's also been involved with an organization called Sustain Haiti. Check out his post below!

Sustaining Haiti

Looking at the headlines recently coming out of Haiti, it becomes clear that the recovery from the earthquake has been slow. The deadly cholera outbreak currently underway definitely could have been prevented with proper sanitation facilities and basic training. Statistics about how little work has been done since the January earthquake can be discouraging and may lead people to ask where their donations to help in the recovery have gone.

For some BYU students and members of the local community, we are especially saddened by the tragedies taking place in Haiti. When the earthquake hit, we decided that we wanted to roll up our sleeves and work among the people affected by the earthquake. We started a project called Sustain Haiti. About 50 volunteers, many of them BYU students, went to Leogane, the epicenter of the quake. We focused on square-foot gardening, sanitation and hygiene education, water purification, working with orphanages and micro finance. We had our share of setbacks along the way but at the end of the summer we were able to establish dozens of gardens, install water filters, teach many school children about hygiene and sanitation, give loans to qualified applicants, teach hundreds of people English lessons and develop many new friendships. Next summer, we will be returning to Haiti to scale up our projects and build on the successes we had last summer. Additionally, we are going to have a small team arrive in January to follow up on our projects.

We believe that in some small way our water filters and hygiene education efforts will help protect our beneficiaries from cholera. We are dedicated to continue working in Haiti as long at the need is there.

Want to lend a hand?
We are going to be having a fundraiser 5k in Orem on November 6th. All proceeds will support our projects in Haiti. Registration information can be found at http://pinnaclesecurity.com/haiti.php.