Spotlights
Entries
2012 Research Featured in CLAS article
The GVSU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) recently released their 2008-2012 quadrennial report. A recent research trip (May 2012) was featured. The report and the article about Haiti research can be found at here, page 31-32.
Wise Beyond Her Years
We interviewed a young woman of 18 years in a small village called Haute La Forge. She was cooking a meal of boiled corn over a fire hearth built of three rocks. She was one of the few people using chlorine to treat her water.
2014 article entitled "Evaluation of forest cover estimates for Haiti using supervised classification of Landsat data"
An article using Landsat imagery to map forest cover in Haiti was recently released in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation.
Paper published on Biosand Filter Use and Sustainability
Field Research, conducted in 2011, has resulted in a publication describing biosand filter use in rural Haiti and the reasons that some Haitians abandon the use of this very effective water treatment technology.
You Can't Judge a Book
We walked about 45 minutes up a steep road to this area referred to as Salo. When we arrived we met an elderly lady at one of the houses. She seemed rather frail so we decided it was not fair to ask her to spend 30 minutes answering our questions.
Using Google Earth to Make a Difference in Haiti
During a recent research trip to Haiti in May 2012, Dr. Peter Wampler and two colleagues from GVSU used GPS and Google earth to find homes for our water and ethnographic surveys.
My Kingdom for a Wrench
We visited a village called Trankite which was about an hour drive, including a river crossing, and an hour hike. When we got there we found someone had distributed biosand filters to at least three of the residents.
Papa Dap!
There a couple of things in Haiti that are not so different from the U.S. One of them is the proliferation of cell phones. Digicell and Voila both sell phones and offer pay as you go service.
Hungry Dogs Don't Play
When we were interviewing one of the rural Haitians he shared with us this Haitian proverb "hungry dogs don't play". We spent the next several days talking about this quote and the way it succinctly describes the plight of Haitians.