Making soap and seeing friends

Yesterday we finally got to do the soap-making seminar I've been planning for awhile! The girls' group in the village has been buying and selling soap for a couple months now, and I offered to pay for the trainer to come if they wanted to learn to do it all from scratch. They were delighted by the idea, so I found the trainer, set a date...and had to whange the date...had to change it again...saw no materials or preperation....was getting worried. But yesterday morning, they pulled it off. We picked up the trainers in the nearby town in a charette, and set up shop in the courtyard by my hut. The girls were put right to work with dull knives, making soap shavings, while the trainer explained the different kinds of soap they were going to learn. In the end, they did it two ways: making soap from scratch with lye, oil, and water; and also extending commercially-made soaps by melting them down and adding water with only a little lye. The extended soap is cheaper to do, but the lye-and-oil soap is more flexible and can be higher quality, depending on the oil. So, we had a fun day stirring pots of boiling soap foam, or beating the oily mixture into a thick batter, then pouring it into improvised moulds to set. The soap hardened enough by that afternoon to cut into bars. Then, I tried to explain to the girls how they should keep track of how much their ingrediants cost, in order to set a price for their soaps and make a profit. They had a really good time making the soap, and I they have a pretty good grasp of basic economics, so I'm looking forward to continuing this little project when I get back! Our next challenge is to find the perfect soap recipe for maximum profit and saleability.
But in the meantime, I'm going on vacation. This is the only big, out-of-Senegal trip I have planned, and I can't wait! I fly out to Togo on Sunday to meet up with my very good friend, Arwen, who I haven't seen for a year and who'se been serving in Togo since I arrived here in Senegal. Then, together we plan to travel up through Burkina Faso, through Mali, back into Senegal before she flies out again. It's gonna be great, right? And best of all, I'll get to be with a friend for Christmas.