project: avert soap disaster. Countdown: t minus 15 minutes.

The title of this blog is taken from a Facebook post that I made last Thursday morning, at about 9:15 am (local time, that is).

About three weeks ago, on a Wednesday, I suggested to my co-teacher at one school that maybe, just maybe, we could make soap at the school and put it in the bathrooms and at the sinks so the kids could use it to wash their hands. I had found a glycerin-based soap recipe and instructions on our PC Thailand Wiki, along with a video a former volunteer had posted about the hand-washing projects and lessons she had prepared to go along with her soap-making project. (I later found out that the liquid soap recipe might be for washing dishes, but whatever. Germs are germs. Soap is soap.) My co-teacher immediately mentioned my idea to another teacher who was in the lounge. She thought it was a great idea. Sweet! I thought, This might actually happen.

Two days later, I was sitting in a staff meeting at the school, trying to pay attention and keeping one eye out the window in case the thunder clouds started gathering ominously and I could make a dash out the door with the "dtong bpai gon fone dtok" (gotta go before it rains!!) excuse. I had no such luck. Instead, at the very end of the meeting, my co-teacher produced the documents I had printed from the wiki, and gave them to the pa'a, announcing that next week, I would make soap with the kids. My face did the thing that it does when I'm a little shocked and annoyed, and kind of worried. And then I did my best to rearrange my face into a smile, and agree to the project.

Crap. I thought, This is going to happen next week. This is only a problem because we hadn't yet discussed a) where to procure glycerin, rock salt, four kilos of limes/kaffir limes, and lye and b) the fact that the limes have to ferment and if you make lye from scratch with ashes, it takes at least a week before it's ready. I shouldn't have worried. The following week, the students showed up, as planned (and as they were ordered), with limes and kaffir limes (they're wrinkly, so from here on out, I'll call them wrinkly limes) and also with empty water bottles for bottling the soap. I brought some from my house, too. Someone else who works at the school showed up with a bunch of ashes. The water at the school was on. We had buckets. We had kids who were excited to be let out of class for 2 hours to watch the farang do something weird. It went fine. We cut 4 kilos of limes, added sugar, water and put the cap on. We added 12 liters of water to 4 kilos of ashes, stirred, and put the cap on that bucket, too. We made big plans for finishing the soap the following week.

And then, I went and changed all the plans on everyone because I had to go to the doctor last week, and that's like a 24 hour long process of travelling, checking into a hotel, travelling some more, talking to the PC doc, getting an appointment, etc., etc. So I was going to have to leave before the Friday when we'd planned to finish the job. I asked a few teachers if they could rearrange their schedules for the Thursday morning so we could finish the soap. They happily obliged. I created a PowerPoint about handwashing that I hoped to use on Wednesday in the English classes. I figured it would all be okay.

On Thursday morning, though, 15 minutes before go-time, I hadn't seen my co-teacher. I wasn't sure if the ash-water would have turned lye-like enough because it had only been 6 days, not 7-10, as stated in the instructions. We hadn't been able to do the handwashing lesson on Wednesday, mostly because I hadn't been able to convey the importance of the lesson to my co-teacher, so we'd done more phonics instead. I was tired. I was told that the 5th grade teacher, whose rowdy class no one can really control, least of all me and my co-teacher during our English classes, was not going to be able to come and help during the soap session. (As happens a lot here, she had a training she had to go to. I think it may have been in the afternoon, but she had to leave around 10. I didn't argue.) So I posted on FB about averting disaster, while taking a break between googling more "liquid soap making" pages and hoping for something brilliant that I hadn't yet come across to pop up. (No such luck.) About 3 minutes later, I found out my co-teacher had something else to do (painting the set for something for the anuban [pre-school] or something I didn't really understand, and although I did wonder whether we would have taught English during our regular time were it not for the soap-making that was replacing it, I decided not to press the point that my co-teacher really should have been available). Not much else to do but roll with it.

Rolling on over to the cafeteria, where we had started the project the week before, I found the school's janitor/handyman setting up a white board for me. But it was right in front of the table on which I planned to do everything, and blocking the students' view. So I tried, rather desperately, to communicate that the board was blocking the view and somehow this resulted in the poor old man going and getting more crap to put in front of the table to block the students' view. I gave up. Sometimes desperation gets in the way of communication. We got out the buckets of fermented wrinkly limes and ash water. The students sat down. I asked them to recall what we had done the week before, and promptly confused them and myself because I couldn't remember correctly. That straightened out, I proceeded to introduce the glycerin, the salt, and the process, as well as a few vocab words: germs, clean, wash your hands.

I invited a few students to come up and help me strain the juice from the wrinkly lime bucket. We set it aside. I asked if the remembered the name of the wrinkly lime in English, and one kid did. He could still even spell "Kaffir."

I invited students up to mix the salt and glycerin, then carried the bucket around the room to the tune of their "oohs" and "aahs" - polite kids, these, pretending to be so excited.

Then I put on long rubber gloves as we -  the mee krua (cook) and the janitor and I - strained the ashwater into a separate bucket. I tried to explain to the kids that I was wearing gloves because lye is dangerous, but the whole thing went over their heads - mostly because the mee krua and the janitor were bare handed, and I was wearing sandals and had bare legs anyway. (I mean, come on, these kids watch their parents solder without masks, build houses in flip flops, and spray pesticides on their fields in t-shirts).

I wrote the following song on the white board (theoretically sung to the tune of "Row Row Row Your Boat"):

Wash wash wash your hands
Wash them every day
Wash them with soap and wa-ter
And keep the germs away!

I had the students read the lyrics a few times, and then I sang it to them (never an effective teaching tool, my voice).

They kinda got it, but mostly the whole thing just fell flat (musically and metaphorically).

I invited the kids up to stir the mixture as I added lye water in a few liters at a time. I tried to lead the other kids in keeping time by singing the song, but that was disastrous so we just ended up counting to thirty and back down. And by we counted, I mean, I counted, they repeated, and we all got sick of each other pretty fast.

Soon, we had added all the ashwater, and all the wrinkly lime juice, and we had a bucket of soapy stuff. The janitor had rigged an electric drill with a stirring stick, and after all the kids had taken turns stirring the mixture with a long bamboo pole while their friends counted to 30 (with some significant help, in some cases, though not all), we pulled out the electric mixer, and the boys went wild.

Then, we put the cap on the bucket. Cleaned up. Got ready for lunch. Had no time to bottle the soap, mostly because my time-management skills are not awesome.

And then I ate lunch, and I left for Bangkok and four days of medical appointments and farang food.

Disaster averted? More or less. No one lost an eye or left covered in lye. There's a bucket of soap waiting to be poured into smaller bottles and distributed around the school, ready to meet the small and dirty hands of grade school children, several times a day.

At least, I hope that bucket of soap is still there.