Soap plans washed out, but mission still a success

SAN ISIDRO, Heredia, Costa Rica -- When Carolyn Schussler first taught me to make soap, in preparation for my 2005 mission trip to Kenya, pure lye was widely available in U.S. grocery stores under the "Red Devil" brand, located on the aisle with the drain cleaners.

Since that time, Red Devil has stopped selling its pure lye product. I stocked up on it when it was on clearance sale, and I don't make soap all the time, so I still have some on hand. I understand that there's another brand which is available primarily through hardware and home improvement stores, but I haven't had a chance to look for it.

Carolyn, who now lives in Florida, was supposed to be the fourth member of this year's LEAMIS International Ministries Costa Rica team. She was going to teach soap-making as a cottage industry, and had already turned in a list of materials which our hosts were supposed to purchase ahead of time. You can't take a corrosive chemical like lye in your checked baggage, so it must be obtained in-country. Besides, if the students are going to continue making soap once the course has ended and the mission team has returned home, we need to know that they're going to be able to find the materials themselves.

About a week before our trip was scheduled to begin, Carolyn got some bad medical news related to a family member, and she understandably needed to drop out of the trip. our team leader, Frank Schroer, asked me to take over the soap-making workshop. I rushed out and bought some of the necessary utensils to take with me, so that I could leave the equipment with the church as a sort of "starter kit."

Frank told me that our hosts already had Carolyn's list of materials.

One night during the trip, while we were in Heredia on other business, we stopped at HiperMas, a Wal-Mart-owned supercenter chain, and it was suggested that I pick out the materials myself. That was my first notice that our host pastors -- who didn't seem to have much grasp of what the soap-making workshop was all about -- hadn't yet bought any of the material.

I went to the drain-cleaner aisle and found a product that looked very similar to Red Devil lye and which listed caustic soda (another name for lye) as its only ingredient. Bingo!

... or maybe not. I had second thoughts, and did some checking online from my host Dan Shockley's computer in San Josecito. It turns out that "caustic soda" can refer not only to sodium hydroxide (lye) but also to potassium hydroxide. When it comes to cleaning your clogged drains, the two can be used interchangeably, but they are quite different when it comes to making soap. Potassium hydroxide produces a softer product and in fact it's mostly used to make liquid soap. In any case, I didn't have any recipes for, or experience with, using it.

By the time I thought to look the product up online, it was the night before I was scheduled to teach soap-making. The next day, a Saturday, we tried without success to track down sodium hydroxide. It was too late in the trip to reschedule soapmking for another day.

I left two stockpots with the church -- they can use them for cooking, and I wanted the room in my luggage for souvenirs. I brought the rest of my equipment back to the U.S.

Meeting needs

In recent years, LEAMIS has tried to avoid some of the standard mission trip activities -- such as construction -- and to emphasize programs like water purification and cottage industry. LEAMIS believes these type of programs can have a more lasting impact on improving the lives of the people with whom we work. But LEAMIS is also a believer in listening to its host pastors and meeting what they consider the most important needs of their communities. Sometimes, those two ideas bump into each other.

On our Costa Rica trip, our hosts had us painting and helping to install a tin roof, tasks that could have been done just as easily by locals as by foreign visitors.

Part of the problem is that the churches in San Isidro and San Josecito simply don't suffer from the type of poverty LEAMIS has worked to address during the past several years. Those churches had different needs.

Our spiritually-oriented programs, like leadership training, worked very well, and all of us who participated considered the Costa Rica trip a great success. But the people in those communities didn't really need the practical relief programs that LEAMIS has tried to emphasize in recent years. We didn't bring the water purification with us, and we didn't end up teaching soap making (or any other cottage industry).

Our host pastors, Marlon and Eduardo, talked to Frank about some possibilities for future trips which would take LEAMIS volunteers into more rural areas of Costa Rica, to visit smaller, more isolated congregations with which Marlon and Eduardo are acquainted. If that happens, we'd be more likely to find places where things like cottage industry or water purification are needed. That may be turn out to be the most important seed planted during our trip.

I don't know what LEAMIS's schedule will be next year or what my own plans will be. But I had a great experience in Costa Rica, and I'd have no reservations about going back.

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LEAMIS International Ministries: leamis.org