Port-au-Prince is busy. It's constantly moving
and until you can actually pick up on
the patterns and recognize what's going on
it seems incredibly disorganized and
at first to somebody coming from a formalized
economy like the US
you think, where is the
system
and then you realize
you're just the one that doesn't have
the road map.
In June I launched a clean water business 
called within Kouzin Dlo in Haitian Creole or
Community Chlorinators
in English and it's a direct sales
company
that trains women to sell liquid
chlorine for household water treatment
in their communities all throughout the
country.
First and foremost
Kouzin Dlo is about disease
prevention and then
the second part, the mechanism by which
we prevent disease,
is by creating jobs. Some of our first funding
was from the Tisch College at Tufts
University. After that
the Archimedes Project, our parent
organization
helped us to do a crowd funding
campaign that we were successful with and
that kinda rounded out our summer
funding for the pilot
and to get us into the fall.
Jessica Laporte is actually legitimately one of the most impressive
young people or actually people, full-stop
period, end of sentence, that I've ever met.
She's going to be running Community Chlorinators in Haiti
I'm trained as a scientist. I study microbes, specifically I study cholera
and trying to understand how it's
capable of transmitting so
rapidly in populations. But when
your desire as was mine as is mine
is to actually lower disease burden
and to keep people, especially young
children,
from dying from diarrhea, science is not
the right way to go
because we already have the solution
it's all about
clean water access. Something that we've
been able to fix
since the late 1800s and that just seems
completely unacceptable to me.
It's not about using more force
for this really difficult problem. It's
about local buy-in
it's about business models, it's about
partnerships
it's about finding funding. It's about
bringing them together
and using them as leverage to solve this
problem.
In order for Kouzin Dlo to launch
in a community we first start by
building a partnership
so we'll have some conversations. What
organizations have come in before?
Where do people get water? What is the
sanitation situation?
Have you been experiencing cholera? Is
diarrhea prevalent?
 And then after the site visit
along with our partner we recruit a few
women
to come and to be trained as managers.
What's really cool about the product is
its simplicity
it's not a filter with multiple steps. One
capful
of the same bottle that holds the
chlorine in it goes into a five gallon bucket.
 I love working with
patients. The ingenuity and creativity
and
just the overall capacity to fix
problems
to put the different resources together in
a way
that makes it work. In Haiti you make
things work.
One of the ways that our product markets itself
 is actually in giving out a sample of
the water treated with the chlorine
because people are constantly amazed by
the taste
but you really hold firm to this a
product that you buy
because you want the message about Kouzin Dlo
to be
this is something that someone in my
community is actually making money
by participating in this. The important
thing is that we function as a business
so I make decisions about what buckets
to use what materials to use
how much to pay
the different people working for us as a business
I think that really has allowed me from
day one to look at the question of
sustainability
In the aid model you create the jobs for that
person handing it out
while the money lasts. Sustainability in a
business means are the numbers actually
gonna add up at the end of that day
is this gonna continue going and
continue supplying
the product to the customer
When I graduated from Tufts I really felt
like okay I took
all these courses and now I'm starting
this business with the tools that I
learned in the classroom.
I couldn't wait to get back to Haiti
and actually see how it worked on the ground
but at the end of the day I went back to
feeling over my head and not knowing if
I could do it so it was definitely a bit
of a roller coaster.
Being here the five months that I've
been here has gone exactly as I
wanted it to because my expectation was
to learn. My expectation was that
the idea that I originally came down with
was going to be
significantly revised. My dream
for Kouzin Dlo is that we would really
prove that this works
right that we would be successful as
a business but more importantly this
would be a lesson learned
in how you can get life-saving
technology
into the hands of the people that need
it.
