Whoa I know... another blog post!

I must be getting bored or something. Anyway here's a story:

While I was in Ouaga last week, another volunteer and I went on a mission to find "the soap place". To clarify we weren't trying to by soap; "the soap place" sells all the materials one needs to make soap. I had been hearing about this shop since my arrival in Burkina and the part of me that likes to play with chemicals was dying to see it.

Making soap is an income generating activity for many women in village. In fact, I just bought two bottles of homemade liquid soap from my neighbor yesterday. (each bottle costs 100 cfa, ~ 25¢) Some volunteers work with women's groups that communally make things, such as soap, to sell.

These bottles do not contain either Sprite or Fanta, just cleverly colored liquid soap.

Going back to the store, which according to "everyone" is located downtown "not far from Marina Market". That's all the directions we had. So we started at Marina where a lady told us to go down the street two blocks and that we would "smell the soap". We tried that, but with all the faux-types (what we call the really obnoxious street vendors) shadowing and haranguing us we ended up a bit lost.

Rule #1: never appear lost. At this point a guy walking past me opened the zipper of my hip belt backpack pocket. Luckily I had taken everything out of that pocket. [I have a general anti-theft backpack strategy that so far has worked well. (see pictures below)] Needless to say this motivated us to not look lost. A very nice lady at a street boutique gave us excellent directions and we eventually made it to the soap store.

hip belt backpack pocket (what an awkward name!)

To deter thieves take two zippers and...

... weave their cords together. I put everything in the compartments that I can close like this.

The first lady wasn't joking though. You could smell the chemicals from almost half a block away! Outside the door was a table with various jars of perfume oils labeled "fleur mélange", "citrus", "vanille" etc. Almost the Body Shop scented oil collection, almost. Inside the store on the right was a shelf with plastic bags full of powdered dyes hanging all over it. The dyes were sold by 10 g sachets (plastic bags). Hanging next to the dyes were powdered sulfur, aluminum salts and other salts. To the left of the door were huge 55 gallon drums of various bulk chemicals. I noticed potassium hydroxide and bleach, but I'm still really curious about the rest. The chemical smell was completely overpowering.

You could keep going straight through the small "lobby" area to what appeared to be a chemical storeroom. Before that though there was a window where you placed your order. The man there wrote out a ticket/receipt which you then gave to another guy who gathered everything together.

Side story: I touched one of the sachets of blue dye. I knew it was a bad idea, but I couldn't help myself, it was so pretty! The workers were amused and shocked that I had blue dye all over my hands and also that I didn't seem too concerned about it. I made a joke about being a schtroumpf (smurf), but I think it fell flat. One of them took me out front to wash it off. Here was his method:

1. smeared motor oil over the affected area (still not sure what this did, the dye was supposedly water based);
2. rinsed with water;
3. while rinsing he poured bleach over my hands;
4. kept rinsing until the water in the little pot ran out (enough to get most of the base off).

Well it worked like a charm and my hands smelled like bleach for the rest of the day!