hand in hand soap in haiti

thanks to our incredible customers, the amazing folks of my neighbor’s children, and global soap project we were able to donate 5,000 bars of soap to children in need.  

this past thursday, we packed up the soap in a ton of suitcases and were off to haiti.  Haiti looks like the earthquake happened merely a month ago which is devastating.  Rubble and trash are everywhere.  However, the Haitian people are resilient and work hard to survive each and every day.  People are still living in Tent Cities without any access to clean water.  Many Haitians living in the mountains have to walk 2hrs to get water for their families and sometimes it isn’t even potable once they arrive.  

Speaking with people that are working day in and day out to make Haiti a safer & healthier country, made us realize how important our mission at Hand in Hand Soap truly is.  In many cases, Haitian people need clean water & proper hygiene practices more than they need food.  Since medical care is hard to come by, simple hand washing is their key to survival.  We knew this before going to Haiti but it wasn’t until we saw these children and their heart-breaking living conditions that we realized we are doing the best thing possible.  

We have never seen children more excited to open up a bar of soap and smell it with their eyes closed, smiling ear-to-ear.  

so to you, our loyal customers and supporters, thank you for making our first soap an absolute success.  here’s to a hopeful future together, hand in hand.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33280689/#.Tx9Kupic-Vg

Nearly two decades after he arrived in this country, Ugandan Derreck Kayongo is still bowled over by one subtle display of American wealth: the endless array of soaps available in stores.

In his African homeland, the cost of soap is out of reach for many, often with tragic consequences. In 2004, the World Health Organization found roughly 15 percent of deaths among Ugandan children under age 5 resulted from diarrheal diseases, many of which could be prevented through hand sanitation.

Now America’s bountiful soap bars have prompted Kayongo to launch the Global Soap Project, an effort to help his country’s poorest — one used bar of hotel soap at a time.

An Atlanta-based anti-poverty advocate, Kayongo has collected several tons of lightly used soap bars under a plan to melt them down, sterilize them and reshape the soap for shipment to refugees in Uganda to help curb disease.

For Uganda’s destitute, soap is a luxury.

“Most people find it very hard to spend money on something like soap which could actually help them prevent diseases,” Kayongo said. A bar of soap can run 500 Ugandan shillings — about 10 American cents — on a continent where many refugees have a dollar to live on daily.

Cleaning up with used soap sounds, well, dirty.

But Kayongo said soaps will be separated by hotel brand and gently washed to remove makeup and other surface dirt. Next, bars will go into a high-temperature oven where they will melt and transform into a soapy, sterile, slurry. Kayongo said the mixture will go into molds to harden and emerge as large bars of soap.

“All it needs is just cleaning and re-melting and remolding,” he said.

Soap for charity 
Each day, in millions of American hotel rooms, the cleaning staff replaces soap and other toiletries.

Patrick Maher, a consultant to the American Hotel & Lodging Association, said hotels usually throw away used soap. But he said nonprofits have begun stepping up to recycle soap for charitable purposes.

“It’s one of the new things this year,” Maher said.

One such charity, Florida-based Clean the World, says it has collected about 17,000 pounds of used soap since February for distribution in impoverished countries worldwide.

For the Global Soap Project, Kayongo says he has gathered 10,000 pounds of used hotel soap from 60 hotels in Georgia, Florida and Tennessee. Hotels collect lightly used bars which they place in bins. One of Kayongo’s 10 volunteers takes the bars to a donated warehouse near Atlanta that he’s using.

Kayongo’s own family had once thrived off his father’s business making soaps and running a printing press in Uganda. But Kayongo said they went from being members of the middle class to refugees, losing everything under the harsh rule of former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

The family fled to Kenya, where Kayongo said life without basics became the norm.

Now Kayongo wants to give other refugees a small item that can make a big difference. He plans to send off his first shipment in late October.

Kayongo, a senior advocacy field coordinator for CARE International, has committed about $5,000 of his own money toward the $13,000 cost to send the soap and is seeking donations to make up the rest. CARE International, a global anti-poverty group, is not sponsoring the project.

The luxury of soap 
Since June, just one Ritz-Carlton hotel in Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood has turned over 3,000 pounds of soap which otherwise would have gone into the trash.

“When I heard Derreck speak about it, I thought it sounded really easy and why haven’t we been doing this all along?” said Olivia Brown, a manager at the hotel.

Kayongo got the idea back in the mid ’90s. He’d recently arrived in America and when he settled into his hotel, Kayongo was surprised to find packages of soap.

He used the bars, but was confused the next day when he found they’d been replaced.

“This went on for two or three days,” said Kayongo, who finally called his father back in Africa and chuckled about it.

The men talked about how the soap could be melted down and reused. Kayongo sat on the idea for a few years, until his father recently brought it back up.

“If you live on a dollar a day,” Kayongo said, “what are the chances you spend even one cent of that dollar on buying a luxury like soap?”

We are obviously about doing things for a good cause on this blog, except this time, there were no free drinks involved.  Over the weekend, I volunteered my time at The Global Soap Project (GSP), a fairly new non-profit organization that’s gaining a lot of popularity (see CNN Heroes).  Founded around the idea of conserving the amount of waste that the United States disposes of, the organization partners with hotels to manufacture bars of soap from partially used, discarded soaps.  The soap is then distributed to impoverished countries around the world.

Where all the major work happens

The soaps are sorted by colors to ensure a better quality end product

The top layers of the soaps are manually removed (insert volunteers) before they are processed.

Overall, I was extremely impressed by GSP and they will be definitely getting our vote for CNN Heroes.  I couldn’t help but be excited about how lucky some kids, and adults, would be to simply take a bath with soap. Some kid out there can actually sing and relate to this song.

~Cheech

http://kaco1.tumblr.com/post/7197571921/soap

Throughout my experiences living and visiting other countries, I observed many things that are different and unique. 

I recently saw this article about the Global Soap Project, cleaning and recycling barely used hotel soap for populations needing increased sanitization.  A great story about repurposing waste… but how could this waste be prevented?

As we stayed at many European hotels during our travels, many had soap dispensers at the sink and shower for soap and shampoo.  Using dispensers as shown below (next to the shower head), eliminates manufacturing, transportation, housekeeping storage and delivery, and waste for thousands of small bottles and bars of soap.  Both wall-mounted and non-mounted (counter-sitting) bottles were common.

Easy! Not just available as the industrial plastic dispensers, but in classic styles that look great in the fancy hotels… or even your house!

Links:

http://www.hotel-supply.com/soapdispenser_wall_mounted_500ML

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Living-AVIVA-Chamber-Dispenser/dp/B000FGI254/ref=sr_1_cc_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1309716449&sr=1-3-catcorr

http://www.amazon.com/Fieldcrest-Luxury-Shaped-Glass-Soap/dp/B003ATOQOO/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1309717174&sr=8-7

CNN Story:  http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/16/cnnheroes.kayongo.hotel.soap/index.html

Global Soap Project:  http://www.globalsoap.org/index.html

——

Kacey Fetcho-Phillips

http://kaco1.tumblr.com/post/7197571921/soap