From Surplus Soap to Saving Lives – Making a Difference, One Soap Kit at a Time

What’s in a name? For us at Gleaning For The World, our name and mission are everything. They are one in the same.

They are both based on the ancient Biblical practice of gleaning in which Israelite farmers were instructed not to harvest all of their crop, but to purposefully leave fallen grain or sections of their fields un-harvested. Why? In order for the poor to gather the surplus to feed themselves.

The symbolic meaning of harvest in Scripture outlines two important points: God’s provision for us and God’s blessing for others. By a simple choice, others less fortunate, can also reap the benefit of our personal harvest.

With that as our foundation, Gleaning For The World seeks opportunities to gather excess/surplus supplies that we believe are useable and therefore valuable for those in need. (“Those in need” is a phrase we often use to describe individuals and families facing difficult, even tragic circumstances, resulting from nature or man made events.)

An email received a few months ago sparked our interest. It was an opportunity to receive an entire tractor trailer filled with “soap scrap.” You may not be aware, but soap is an extremely useful and practical item for us to have in our inventory. However, we weren’t sure about the word “scrap”! Was it used, second-hand, pre owned?

To better understand this opportunity, we asked for some pictures. The photos revealed huge cardboard boxes filled with pieces of soap (literally thousands of them) — all different shapes, sizes, and colors. We learned that this “scrap” was good quality pieces of soap that were simply remnants of a soap manufacturing process. What an opportunity to take a remnant and repurpose it to continue to reap the benefits of soap! Gleaning at its best! We eagerly accepted the opportunity.

When the truck arrived at our warehouse and was unloaded into our volunteer center, we could hardly wait to see what the soap looked like in-person. The question we all asked, “How can we turn 35,000 pounds of assorted soap pieces into soap kits for our distribution partners?” Our staff and volunteers went to work developing a method to safely cut the scrap into uniform bars of soap, which were then placed into one gallon zip lock bags. We wanted to add washcloths to these new kits. Each finished soap kit contained one pound of small uniform bars of soap, plus two washcloths that we washed, dried, folded and packed into quart size zip lock bags before placing inside of the larger plastic bag. (The purpose of this special packaging was to make sure the kits  were protected during the shipping process and would arrive fully intact.)

Our soap project quickly became a favorite among volunteers. Everyone could participate in creating our soap kits whether it was cutting the soap, folding washcloths or packing boxes with the completed kits. As soon as we finished building one skid of our soap kits, it was shipped out. Our partners loved them!

It took us more than a year to turn the truck of soap scrap into 11,136 soap kits. Eleven thousand, one hundred thirty-six kits! Our volunteers logged an impressive 1,629 hours to help make the kits. And to where were the pallets of soap kits shipped? Ethiopia, St. Lucia, Ukraine, Honduras, Guyana, Haiti, Jordan and to the state of Kentucky as part of two different disaster responses. Soap kits were also distributed to local partner here in central Virginia…

Why do we do all of this? According to the Global Handwashing Partnership:
“Each year, approximately 525,000 children die from diarrheal diseases, making it one of the top killers of children globally. Almost all cases of diarrhea in children are caused by infections, which means that most of these deaths are entirely preventable. One of the most effective ways of preventing diarrheal diseases is hand washing with soap.”

With all this in mind, October 15 is Global Hand-Washing Day, an international handwashing promotional campaign with the goal to motivate and mobilize people around the world to improve their hand-washing habits in order to prevent diseases and infections.

What a great time to be reminded that we can make such a huge difference in our world by gleaning! We do it as an organization, but as God provides for us individually, we can choose to glean so others are blessed. Has God provided your needs this month? Would you like to be a blessing to others? You can do that by clicking here to make a financial donation to our work together this month. Every dollar given is used to help those in need. God bless you for what you decide to do with God’s provision this month.