Hotels' old soap reused

Derreck Kayongo couldn't believe it.

While staying in a Philadelphia hotel 10 years ago, the Uganda native noticed the bar of soap he had used was replaced with a new bar when he returned to his room later that day.

He asked the concierge what happened to the used soap.

"We threw it away," he was told.

Kayongo, a one-time war refugee who as a 10-year-old boy fled with his mother and father to Kenya to avoid the atrocities of dictator Idi Amin in 1979, was confounded by the waste.

Last week, he relayed a little of his life's story and his newfound use for the discarded soap to about 1,000 people as the keynote speaker during Blackbaud's three-day Conference for Nonprofits at the Charleston Area Convention Center.

For nearly 15 years after coming to America, Kayongo worked with service groups such as Amnesty International and CARE, but he never forgot about the soap.

About six months ago, after a discussion with his father about finding his passion, Kayongo began thinking: With 4.6 million hotel rooms in the U.S., he estimated 2.6 million bars of soap are tossed in the trash every day. That's about 1 billion bars a year. At about 2 inches per bar laid end to end, it's enough to circle the globe with plenty to spare or cross the U.S. about 10 times.

Kayongo thought about the thousands of African children who die every day because of unsanitary conditions in refugee camps. He wondered if there was a way to put that used soap in the hands of those children.

Kayongo contacted the Intercontinental Hotel in metro Atlanta, which gave him the first 400 pounds of used or discarded soap.

Today, the Atlanta resident has amassed 9 tons of the slippery bars from hotels across the Southeast and Boston through his new volunteer service group, the Global Soap Project.

In January, after volunteers melt down the soap and remold it into thousands of new bars, about 10,000 refugees who had fled war and are living in squalor in northwest Kenya will be lathering up with what was once headed for U.S. landfills.

"It may seem trivial to us, but it will humanize them," Kayongo said. "They have nothing."

Now 39 and a U.S. citizen of five years living the American dream with a wife and two children, Kayongo told conferees never to forget their mission.

"You have to step up and prove your worth to society," he said. "I saw a niche, and I filled it."

Reach Warren Wise at 937-5524 or wwise@postandcourier.com.