HRI has demonstrations with new stoves and ovens at the New Vision Training Center in Arcahaie




Hundreds of local officials and representatives of PHARE came to see New Visions TEACH Center opening.











Vetiver protection
 is evident on muddy roads of Haiti! Vehicles slide over the side by gravity with wheels locked on steep grades. Extreme caution and even pushing vehicles to the high side of road is sometimes necessary to keep them on the road.
















Vetiver when planted on the side of the road will keep the dirt from eroding over the hill leaving the road level. If vetiver was planted above the road on the mountainsides the moisture and silt would stay off the road and it would stay dry longer. Here even a motorcycle goes over the side.

 Gabion basket walls are hard work to put in, these are eroding away but can be saved if protected by vetiver grass hedges across the top along the road and below which is very easy to plant.
Below picture is gully plugs that have filled to capacity with silt and debris and running over the walls.  Vetiver hedgerows planted in front of top rocks continuing onto mountainsides will protect the soil and continue upward making large flat fertile terraces.
 Interest for the 3-step mountainside gardening with vetiver protection is
 increasingly desired.  HRI was offered land and buildings to encourage our starting training.  We need to keep up the interest but we are looking for barren land in view of the National Highway for the demonstration/training site.



Nadal & Samuel are President and Vice President of AAE Association of friends of children in La Gonave spend day with HRI and will be y island with no rivers.  They return with vetiver to plant before the rainy season.leaders on thier Island promoting vetiver hedgerows on their dr
 Staying with Mission Lifeline who fixes 3000 school lunches per day for local schools.  Lifeline Staff
 Haiti Reconstruction is on a joint mission with Crossroads and Helping Hands for Haiti We are hoping to start our stove program in their New Vision Training Center in Arcahaie Haiti. See our new video! Using our Tlud cook stove for Haiti to make a Spaghetti dinner which only took 45 minutes! It will save millions of trees and bring Haiti into the 21st century with the newest technology


these happy women's livelihoods!

 

We will replace selling charcoal with clean burning pellets for healthier lives while saving the trees!

Click here to see how we can give them new job opportunities!
Click here to see why we have to stop burning charcoal!


HRI has been looking for reasons to entice


Haitians to want to plant
Vetiver and ways to subsidize those who plant it by those who will also benefit saving the Soil, filling the Aquifers, Reforesting the Mountainsides, keeping sediments off the reefs and mitigating hazards of frequent hurricanes.
Energy !
Our first project building clean efficient cook stoves with the best and latest Tlud technology will be using agricultural waist and tree trimmings for
rural areas.  We will also be making models that will be using pellets to replace the selling of charcoal in
urbanareas and eliminate the need for cutting trees!

But we need grass on all the mountainsides and this will create way more grass than we need for cook stoves.  Then we will develop small electrification generation plants for communities all over rural Haiti using vetiver grass in bio-digestion.   This process will also use humanure which will be the best way for sanitation eliminating Cholera bacteria and leaving great fertilizer.



 

I just returned from our Formation Site at Arcahaie where Joel Ducasse has the largest vetiver nursery in the Caribbean.  He also has many other wonderful plants that need little cultivation which can be planted between the rows of vetiver on the mountainside the produce nitrogen and food!  Stove production equipment is there but we are still waiting for tons of sheet metal and pelletizers that are held up in customs.
Click here or also under 2 Replenish soil Reforest to see more on the plants for mountainside gardening, Joel Ducasse and Ketty Paquiot are multiplying a seed developed in IDIAF, Puerto Rico.


O'Yes I found one more use for vetiver since our training center is not built yet, vetiver made a very nice 5 ft. deep mattress under our tent!


 





Sylvia Hegi our 1st HRI visitor in Arcahaie all the way from Interlaken Switzerland 

(discovering the value of Benzolive also known as Moringa)

Her group is north at
Montrouis and is scheduled for a training session.

 

 

 

New material for
Sant Fòmasyon and
Fòmasyon Recho

 

 

New stove design appropriate for Haiti:

 

 

 

TChar Technology for Cookstoves


 These stoves use dry chunky fuel to produce woodgas which burns cleanly and produce charcoal which can be used for continued cooking or as biochar.
TLUD and TCharbon Stoves for Sustainable Haitian Development




JOINT PROJECT

Joel Ducasse from HSSA is working with FHS and us at HRI.

We are co-operating with a great pilot project program to provide a systematic way for Ti Bois community of 4,000 inhabitants in Matheux watershed, to secure their energy needs from biomass on a sustainable basis and boost their economic activities (reduction of post harvest losses, water irrigation), and domestic needs (cooking, lighting, electrification), and accumulate social capital and growth, while countering external market forces that are devitalizing this community and affecting the environment.  Once we establish this program we will replicate it all over Haiti, training them in our Fòmasyon Centre.
Click here to see, "Camping for the future of Haiti".pdf

 

Haiti Reconstrucion International is starting a waiting list of organizations whowant to sponsor 5 students from the rural community they are working with!
Sponsoring students for Fomasyon Recho (training center)

 

These students will come as a team for an extensive 1 week course to learn how run a business assembling and selling clean burning healthy improved biomass cookstoves.

They use any dry organic matter for fuel which will save the trees.  Families can pay for a stove for a months supply they now pay for charcoal!

 

Our program also teaches them how they can stop the erosion, restore the hillsides grow more food and replace selling charcoal by selling pellets to urban areas. We also follow up the teams to make sure they are sucessful.

 

If you are interested email me at memahowald@hotmail.com
Reason we picked TLUD stoves as Haiti Reconstruction International's 1st project to help Haiti 

 

To strengthen the Fòmasyon Recho project for success, Haiti Reconstruction International is joining forces with:


1. 

2. 


3. FS (Fondation Solidarité), non-profit, registered also under FHS (Fondation Haiti Solidarité) FHS is there to work in watershed protection, support environmental activities (related to Water, Renewable Energy, and Waste Management), and help in biotech appropriation in the rural sector)


4. HSSA (Haiti Solidarité SA) a conglomeration of Bio Récolte SA, Permagri SA and IMGESA  HSSA (This is a Haitian organization led by the Ducasse' family with Haitian labor who will be making stove kits for our
Fòmasyon Recho project)


5. BEF (Biomass Energy Foundation) a non-profit group of stove experts from the USA who has developed  and is promoting our project


6. JDT (Joseph Denis Thomas Foundation) general operating start up grant


7. HRI will lead the Fòmasyon Centre and market the stoves



 

We cooked at Matthew 25 House in Delmas at our TLUD stove demonstration


We serves over 70 meals on our Biomass cookstoves


Everyone wants to get one to save money from buying charcoal.




 

 

 

 

Haiti Reconstruction International members are now in Arcahaie Haiti with Joel Ducasse (established Haitian business leader, entrepreneur and conservationist) establishing the Formation Center.  From left to right: Joel Ducasse, Paul Anderson, Joe, Mike and Marc-Anny our potential
Fòmasyon Center Leader.


This giant pile of charcoal we are standing on is charcoal  fines that have spilled from millions of sacks.  It has been accumulating at this port in Arcahaie where the ships from La Gonave and Northern Haiti for many decades, which represents the destruction of millions of trees. Our mission here is to eliminate the use of charbon and save the pye bwa.

With TLUD cook stoves, the ladies loved our demonstration.

We cooked and served 2 more huge meals at our demonstration in Arcahaie


Demonstration with Rene Durocher from EKo-Ayiti, Bob Pierre Louis engineer, Joel Ducasse, Mike Mahowald HRI, Antigie Daniel Quachee Eko-Ayiti, Joe Minnick HRI, Paul Anderson HRI / Biomass Energy Foundation.


Paul A. Ketty Paquiot,
Foundation Haiti Solidarite, Bétonus Pierre,
World Bank, Environment and Energy Mike M, Joel Ducasse, Joe M.

 

HRI receives our first nice contribution for seed money from JDT Foundation to keep a man on the ground and start putting the center together.


Member from McLean VA
Marjorie
Brennen Founder and Director

 

HRI Formation Center is designed for Haitians to train Haitians.  We are starting to promote our new TLUD cook stoves;
TLUDstands for top lit up draft.  Many kinds of biomass will burn in the chamber from little oxygen coming thru the bottom creating a gas, this gas is burned off by an after burner at the top.  It is the cleanest burning stoves of its kind that burns biomass and hopefully eliminate the charcoal and cutting all the trees in Haiti.

 

New Video of WINNER project They are doing much of what we are pushing for on our pages!
Click here to see Haiti and Agriculture on the Youth Corps tab under Home
Haiti Reconstruction's most current & promising projects:
Alternative energy,
TLUD
biochar producing stoves, using
vetiver grass for 2011!


 


 


See our new member Sandra M Whiteley and her husband's video Mardi Madichon on the Pwogram Kreyol page,

Criss Juliard, Senior Adviser in agriculture for Chemonics worked on reducing erosion streaming from watersheds that drain into Gonaive and Port-au-Prince.

Vetiver grass is his champion to stop erosion and mitigate dangerous floods. There is a hope to plant 4.6 billion plants for this project in the next 4 years!

Just imagine how much grass can be trimmed from these plants for fuel efficient stoves!

Picture of one of the 6 fields for this project...

This NGO working on the WINNER: Watershed Initiative for National Natural Environmental Resources is doing what is best for Haiti. They are putting thousands of Haitians to work while training them how to plant more food as they save their environment and mitigate immanent disasters from hurricanes. Click here to read more about his mission

Another member Joel Ducasse shows four months growth of vetiver hedgerows planted by his group on La Quinte River border near Gonaives.

Joel's group mulipling vetiver slips this summer!

The best way to reconstruct Haiti is to start by changing the way we help them.

New housing is worthless if families cannot feed themselves.

It takes Long-term solutions to create success; many NGO’s need to work together in Haiti with one goal:

Make Haiti independent by working with them and provide coaching on  tools they need to better take care of themselves.

"We have to take this opportunity, not to reconstruct Haiti, but to rethink and remodel it," President Preval said, adding any recovery program should bring development to rural areas.

If many NGO’s work together on this project Haiti will have the best chance to turn there county into the paradise it once was!

The mountainsides were once covered with trees grass and brush that held the soil, but Haiti’s deforestation came from clearing land to plant crops and cutting firewood to make charcoal for cooking.
Earthquakes are infrequent in Haiti but hurricanes and torrential rains are a persistent problem, their best soil is washed into the sea.

Right now the soil is so depleted during the dry seasons many times their crops are all lost. Without humus nothing holds moisture on the hillsides. Ground water that is deep in the hillsides of Haiti and are lowering because the rains run off the mountainsides instead of filtering down along the roots of trees and grasses.

Many people have been working for environmental solution for decades. They have determined the only way to stop the erosion with Haiti’s magnitude is the use of vetiver grass. This is not a new discovery it has been used all over the world and it is readily available in Haiti and it is the cheapest way to stop the erosion.

Vetiver grass is the only viable way to stop the erosion and bring back humus to hold moisture on their mountainsides and create many gardens that are not now available. It is hard to teach the need of conservation to anyone who is impoverished and hungry, they only want to plant what they can eat. For this reason to get peasants to plant vetiver. It would be great if we had a program that gives them food for their work. Until then they must really understand how this program will provide gardens for their future. Once they understand how much more food they will produce they will work on the program

Experts like Richard Grimshaw, Criss Julaird, Alberto Rodriguez and many other International agriculture engineers and scientists believe the only hope for Haiti to sustain itself and mitigate hurricanes destruction is to start with Vetiver hedgerows. But the farmers also need to plant between these rows with gardens of plants and trees they need and will still regenerate the soil.

Mike Benge senior agroforestry officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development (retired), worked many years on programs for Haiti and played a major role in initiating its first efforts in reforestation. I knew I was on the right path with vetiver grass and raising goats when I saw this article he wrote article this article on Disaster mitigation Haiti.doc after the deadly hurricane Georges in 1998.

Read this article he wrote for the need of vetiver grass and conservation corps to start it. Create a Haitian Youth Corps.doc The Haitian’s must do the work and take ownership of the projects so they can take pride of their success. Haiti must improve from the bottom up, and will if we give them a chance. Just giving food produces dependencies: This work for food program will give them dignity. Terraces work great for producing more food but they are hard to build and can erode if not well supported. Vetiver grass is easy to plant and makes its own terraces and automatically composts as it catches leaves and other vegetation. When it rains eroding soil from the gardens make the best humas as it filters the water through the grass. Vetiver is not only used for hedgerows on mountainsides but can mitigate flooding in rivers. It even can clean pollutants from the water and guards the ocean from contamination. It also can withstand hurricane winds when trees will be toppled and will re-grow from the roots if the tops are burned off and has modules on it to grow when buried in mud.

Vetiver Grass has many uses; it can be cut short for thatching on roofs, for livestock, crafts and it's best use; make grass fuel pucks that can be sold cheaper than charcoal. Haiti and most 3rd world current charcoal production used for cooking is the largest factor in deforestation and erosion.

Vetiver Grass resolves deforestation and grass cuttings can eliminate the original cause as it can replace charcoal for cooking fuel with no harmful side affects and produces biochar fertilizer!  Look on tabs under conserve resources for more conservation projects like Efficient stoves & ovens to save the environment.

Cholera has sickened at least 370,000 people and killed more than 5,500 as of June 19 2011

"Cholera is spread when the bacteria get into water, almost always via human waste." This is a common practice of finding water in dry riverbeds throughout Haiti's countryside where there is a lack of clean water. Countries with good sanitation do not get cholera simply because it does not spread!

In 2005, the US had 12 cases of cholera - no one died. There were 172,000 cases that same year in Guinea-Bissau - 399 died.

The best way to stop this deadly Cholera epidemic is starting composting toilets systems  and stopping erosion with vetiver grass projects so pathogens will not reach the water supply!

Click here to see how composting soil is the only answer to healthy sanitation and disposal of human waist, avoiding Cholera & Typoid, getting rid of pathogens and worms a constant problem in Haiti

Composting Toilets also makes the best fertilizer known to man! After each toilet use user should add a handfull of biochar (finished processed humanure) then add a large handfull of vetiver grass to start composting process when they shut the lid.

Remember fertilizers will wash into the ocean with the soil if not contained on the mountainsides with vetiver hedgerows!  These fertilized gardens can become the most productive in Haiti.

Richard Higgins from Hertfordshire UK joined our site with great expertise on composting toilets with great fertilizer for Family gardens!

Click here to see more on Family Composting Toilets

Composting humanure, click here

Read more about Mr Higgins here

Richard's blog page