Soap Hippos and Mangoes

Soap
I had the opportunity to go to a moringa soap making workshop in the Upper West region of Ghana. Adam, a volunteer there, works with the Lawra Methodist church as a business volunteer. The Lawra Methodist Church runs an orphanage and a center for people living with AIDS. They pay for the facilities primarily by selling moringa soap.
Before I write about the workshop I want to write about an interesting side note. The orphanage has two sets of triplets in its care. Twins and triplets are considered bad luck. Some people here believe that if you give birth to triplets than they will kill you when they get older because children are only supposed to be born one at a time. I’m not sure if that belief is Ghanaian or local to that region or tribe.
The workshop was interesting. Alex, a thin, shy man with a quiet voice led us through most of the steps. You start by adding caustic soda to water and letting it sit for 3 days. You then melt oil to use in the soap. We used palm oil and shea butter. Different substances are added at this point to help get rid of the smell of the oil, such as pieces of lemon. The oil is filtered before being added to the soda. The dried, crushed moringa is then added, as well as any color or scent you want to add. Everything is stirred.
The liquid is poured into a wooden mould lined with plastic. The soap is then left in the mold for several hours to harden. Then the soap is cut by pushing it through some tightened wires. After that, each bar is polished with a tool that looks a lot like a paint scraper. This makes the soap look shiny instead of rough. Each bar is then wrapped and distributed.
One of the cool parts about the workshop is that it included the equipment, which means that the interested people in my community could start a business together and only have to buy the ingredients- which is significantly less than getting the capital to buy equipment and ingredients. Several people in my village have expressed interest.
In addition to learning how to make soap, we also learned how to make soy milk.
The workshop closed with a xylophone performance from another group that Adam works with. This included xylophones, singing, and guitar. The songs were traditional songs from that area.


Hippos
On the way home from the soap making workshop, I went to the Wechau Hippo Sanctuary with Elyse, Lindsey, Jason, and Jeff. We each rented a bike to go into the sanctuary. Our guide, Azize led us through. The bikes were not that great, but it was a nice ride. My bike was a little better than the other ones, which is good- I’m the only person in the group not training for a marathon and I would have had trouble keeping up without my unfair advantage. We brought some mangoes, beans, rice, tomatoes, avacadoes, and bread with us. The sanctuary typically has three options for staying- you can stay in a treehouse right on the river, stay in the lodge, or camp in front of the lodge. Unfortunately, some other people beat us to the tree house, so we ended up staying on the roof of the guesthouse, which was comfortable but not nearly as interesting.
After camping, we biked the rest of the way to the banks of the river. The boat wasn’t big enough for all of us and our guide, so we went out with just the navigator, Suni. Luckily, Jeff is really good in the local language of that area, so we didn’t miss much, because he could translate everything that Suni said.