Save the World With Liquid Soap

It’s school vacation time here in Togo! As an education volunteer, that means my days are even less structured than they are during the school year. Like in America, school vacation time in Togo gives students a break from the rigors of academia for about two and a half months. Final grades are distributed, the schools are closed, and the teachers check out of town. However, unlike America (or at least the America of the twenty-first century), school vacation does not mean freedom. Most of the students in Wassarabo spend their school vacation out in the field, planting and harvesting the rice, millet, yams, and corn crops for next year.

School vacation time for me means helping plan Camp UNITE and trying to keep myself occupied with random projects around village. As boring as the days can be, I love these vacation months. Working with the school in Wassarabo can be mind-numbingly frustrating and it’s nice to have a break. I’ve restarted my moringa nursery and enriched flour project, and have been doing follow-up visits with the participants from my women’s health training.

I’ve also started a little microfinance project with four of my students in Wassarabo. “Microfinance” is very in vogue in the international development community right now, but it’s basically a flashy term for a very simple concept. The idea is to provide small-scale loans to individuals in developing countries, who can then use the initial capital to start small profit-making enterprises, like selling street food or making fabric.

There are countless microfinance projects around the world right now, most of them working with women in third-world countries. Because the money is a loan, not a straight-up donation, development economists love the idea of microfinance. There are those in the international development realm who herald microfinance as the savior of the developing world; these supporters believe that by creating new credit opportunities in poor communities, microfinance can jump-start economic development. Skeptics believe that microfinance is simply too small-scale to have a genuine impact. Sure, microfinance can help individuals, but it can’t really do anything for the global economy. For skeptics, saying microfinance can create economic development is the equivalent of saying a lemonade stand can pull the US economy out of a recession.

(Despite the controversy, microfinance loans have provided life-altering economic opportunities for people, especially women, around the world. If you’re interested in learning more about ways to support women’s economic empowerment through microfinance, check out www.kiva.org. A very worthwhile cause!)

My project is too simple to be controversial: liquid soap for school fees. I picked four of my most responsible girl students to be trained in the art of making liquid soap. I fronted the capital to make 42 liters of liquid soap and the girls will sell the soap and keep the profit to pay for their school fees. Depending on how long it takes the girls to sell the initial 42 liters, they can also re-invest their profit and keep on making soap (as long as their school fees are already covered). The only rule is that the girls need to repay me on my initial investment (the equivalent of about $5 a girl, which I’ll probably use to buy them school supplies).

Making the liquid soap itself is probably the easiest part of the whole process. Remarkably enough, I can buy every ingredient at an agricultural supply store in Sokode. To actually make the soap involves little more than mixing together acid, water, salt, and a kilogram of thick, concentrated gel. Pour in a little perfume and dye and Voila! Liquid soap.



The girls mixing the soap on my front porch



This is what 42 liters of liquid soap looks like!

(Liquid soap is far easier than making hard soap, which I learned the hard way earlier this month. My experiment making hard soap was a complete disaster—I ended up with nasty caustic-soda burns on my hand, a ruined plastic bucket, and soap that won’t lather).

So far, the microfinance aspect of the project is going only ok. The girls need to sell the soap at a certain price in order to make any type of meaningful profit, but disposable income is tight in Wassarabo. The liquid soap is much higher quality than a bar of soap, but it’s more expensive. Only one of my girls so far has sold her entire inventory. There are still almost 6 weeks left until school starts, so the girls still have time and I have faith in them. We’ll see. I might end up giving liquid soap as Christmas presents this year!

Normal is Relative

It’s been almost a full year since I last updated this blog. Partially, I blame Togo. It’s hard to maintain a regular blog when you live without electricity and internet. But that’s kind of a pathetic excuse. There’s no good reason why I can’t handwrite blog entries at my house in village, then actually update during my twice-monthly trips (sometimes more) to the nearest internet café.

So, I got to admit: laziness has been a factor. But there’s another reason for my lack of blogging, a reason potentially more important (or at least more excusable) than laziness: Life here has become normal.

During my first six months in Togo, every interaction and experience I had was an opportunity for a blog entry. Every time I got in a bushtaxi, or traveled to a new village, or ate a meal, or visited a government office, or taught a class, I would find a new source of fascination or frustration or curiosity. Granted, I was never the world’s most avid blogger (that’s where the laziness comes in), but, during my first year, I felt like everywhere I turned there was potential for awesome blog entries. I was always an American observer, looking in from the outside, trying to figure out where I belonged, what was going on, and what in the world I was supposed to be doing.

And now? Well, after over 20 months in Togo, life has settled into life. I’m still the American observer, but things that struck me as strange or illogical during my first year are now bizarrely normal.

It hit me a few weeks back, when I was talking with a group of fellow volunteers about the relative merits of cisterns versus wells. A few lucky volunteers here in Togo have running water, but most of us rely on wells, cisterns, or rivers for our drinking and bathing water. I get my water from a well (then filter, bleach, or boil to make it potable), but have been toying lately with the idea of building a cistern. Rainy season is coming on fast, and it makes sense to have some type of sanitary way to catch rainwater.

We were tossing ideas around about design plans for cisterns, when for some reason, I realized: This is a weird conversation. Weird by American standards, that is. I mean, there are still some cisterns left in America, but wells are pretty much a thing of the past, and I’m not sure there’s anyone who physically goes to a river to get their drinking water anymore (other than backpackers and that’s mostly by choice). In fact, before coming to Togo, I’m not sure if I ever seriously thought about where my drinking water came from, or how lucky I was to be able to drink water directly from a tap.

And now it’s strange to think that when I go home I won’t have to think about filtering or bleaching water anymore. Normalcy is relative, I’ve come to realize. Strange how easily we can adapt! Things like eating unidentifiable meat, taking cold bucket baths under the stars, spending ten minutes negotiating for the price of a five minute motorcycle ride, having a child carry my bag for me, or jamming eight people into a car built for five have now become, well, just life.

P.S. I had a great picture of a monkey sleeping on a basket outside of my house that I wanted to post with this entry but the internet is too slow to upload photos. Oh well. A la prochain!