On the first day, the women whip a product called tansagex in a large basin for 10 minutes. The tansagex is sold by the kilo in the capital. It is basically concentrated soap that resembles shaving cream or marshmallow fluff after a good beating.
After 10 minutes, the women add salt water to the tansagex to make it soluable, followed by small amounts of alternating fresh and salt water to make about 15 total liters of foam.
They let the basin sit over night to allow the foam to dissipate, and the following day we meet back to add perfume and coloring. We then fill up recycled plastic soda bottles with our awesome soap and sell them in the community for 125 cfa each (roughly $0.25). We usually make about 35 bottles per batch but this time we doubled up and made 65 bottles! We then break for a couple days before we meet back to collect money from everybody. All in all, they are very proud of their new business and the money they've made.
Besides helping start a soap group, I have also been incredibly busy planning and finally executing what we in Peace Corps call a Hearth project (in French it is known as a FARN, or Foyer d'Apprentissage et de Réhabilitation Nutritionnelle). This is an activity for mothers with moderately malnourrished children to help rehabilitate them through 12 days of making enriched porridge together and discussing various health topics each day. It requires a lot of planning - finding the children, convincing the mothers, setting dates, getting counterparts to help, gathering materials. I have been trying to figure this out for months. Finally, we set the dates (February 15-26), found 11 mothers to participate with their children, and got the support of all three of the nurses at the health center. We divided the 12 days so that each nurse would help me for four days each. Throughout the activity, we discussed a range of topics which included, basic hygiene, diarrhea and dehydration, nutrition, vaccinations, family planning, malaria, HIV/AIDS, and meningitis. The women were clearly really appreciative of all that they had learned throughout the program. Despite several small hiccups, which is expected for the first time of this quite complicated activity, and that fact that I am still completely drained of all energy, I think it was a good experience for everyone involved. Most of the babies gained about 0.2 - 0.4kg (though one baby gained almost a full kilo) during the 12 days. It sounds like a small increase but most of these babies had not gained (or even had lost weight) in the past few months, and the real results will not be fully understood until after a month or two when we do follow-up weighings with these children. That is when we will better know if the women have kept up what we taught them during the activity. If I do decide to do another Hearth, I think it would go much smoother now that I've already done one, but all I know is that I need to recover from this last one before I think about a sequel.
Our group photo on the last day of the Hearth
