Make up Blog- Soap Making

One of the things that the women of the mother’s association wanted to accomplish was to help make available the essential needs of the girls right in the community house.  Soap being so important for personal hygiene, laundry, etc was the task they wanted to take on.  The soap making effort could also be a source of income generating for future projects and activities within the community house, and could also be the spring board for examining other income generating activities.   This was indeed a blast!

The women were willing to put up for the soap making training, but to be able to support them in obtaining supplies, I also applied for a grant through Peace Corps Partnership  Funds.  With the supplies the grant and the women provided the training went well.  The training was a total of 2 and a half days where they learned to make liquid soap and hard shea butter soap.  The liquid soap came out awesome, with no glitches.   When they plan to make it again they said they would likely dilute it more because even though we made high quality soap, others who make the same soap dilute it more and get more profit.  The only way they would keep it as thick as we made it is if they were able to get clients to buy the soap in bulk, like possibly selling to government offices.

The hard soap turned out to be a crazy story.  So if you know anything about soap, it is all chemical reactions between fats and chemicals like lye.  When the two react, they form suds.  Some soaps have better lather depending on the type of fats you use.  We used a mix of coconut oil and Shea butter as our fats.  All was going well until we did not add the right amount of the substance that is like lye.  The recipie called for 2 kilograms.  I assumed that when I went to the store and order 2 kg that they put it all in the same bag.  Nope they didn’t it was in 2 separate bags and the soap ended up being too oily, but it still had a great lather.  We later found the extra kg of soude caustique (that is the lye) and the women did not give up on their soap and massaged the extra kg into the mix.  It was indeed a challenge, but they were good sports about it.  Thankfully, they were not loosing profit as we used the grant money to get a bunch of the supplies and they would be able to make things up based on the liquid soap sales, but it was indeed a learning lesson.  Nonetheless, they were great sports about it and we had a blast.  These women love to laugh and make jokes and we did just that.

~Special thank you to Peace Corps Partnership Funds!