Interview with Eco-Soap Bank founder, Samir Lakhani
Sangya: Tell us a little bit about your background
“I grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania and had a typical upper middle class childhood. My parents were both professionals. My father is a physicist. My mom is a pediatric dentist. But what’s probably more interesting about them is that they were both part of the Indian diaspora of East Africa. They’re both Gujarati. My mom was born in Dar E Salaam, Tanzania and my dad is from Kampala, Uganda. My mom had an interesting root to the US, she did her undergrad pre-dental stuff at Karachi, Pakistan and then went to dental school in Iran before the revolution. So she traveled as a youngster and then came to Philly to get her US equivalency at Penn. My dad did his undergrad studies at Uganda and was then kicked out by a dictator, Idi Amin. My dad had a fairly large family there, pretty poor as much of the diaspora was at the time.”
“My dad fortunately was in the midst of securing graduate school work at either MIT or Brown in the States. And that was kind of fast tracked because of this crisis. So they let him in but he didn’t get to go to MIT incidentally because the admission officer thought he was a black African as opposed to an Indian African…so he went to Brown and then finally started working for universities and companies including a school in Quebec, Canada where he had to quickly learn how to teach Physics and French in two months. So my parents are like most Indian immigrants in that there was significant turmoil and sweat that needed to go into setting up their lives. And then I came in at a very good moment to enjoy a very comfortable upper middle class suburban life. The important thing was my parents came from the immediate developing world and they realized that was important in terms of my overall development so we spent a lot of time traveling to places like Egypt and other places in the Middle East that they were very interested in. When I was of a mature enough age to kind of handle myself, I traveled to East Africa, lived in India for a little bit, spent a lot of time in Southeast Asia etc.”
“I studied at the University of Florida. I identify climate change as one of the biggest global crises. So, studied environmental studies and went to University of Pittsburgh and studied the same. At the time I had to do an internship and at I had already done a million internships in the U.S; I wanted to do something abroad. So, I partnered with a climate change resilience group in Cambodia. I had traveled there before; my older sister had studied there before in Hong Kong…she said a year before that ‘come let’s just go travelling and do basic volunteering’ and I did. So, I went back to Cambodia. And that’s where everything went downhill.”
Sangya: So explain that trip a little bit more.
“I had been to Cambodia before. I really like Cambodia, intellectually I had formed a pretty significant connection with the country because everything was contextualized with the genocide and the civil war. And, post genocidal countries are very interesting to travel and work in. Because, you can kind of see the hangover effect in every single aspect of their life and institution. For me, to piece that together was pretty interesting. And I really felt for the country. I know a lot about Cambodia now obviously because of 5 years of intensely working there. So I traveled there and was trying to be the western face of the Cambodian non profit, making connections with research groups worldwide..on a side note it’s interesting because we know what climate change does to western countries and cities including Sandy Hook and Miami getting flooding but in Cambodia it’s something as dire as ‘oh the rain came 6 weeks later than traditionally scheduled, we don’t have any water to drink or anything to flood our rice fields with’ so it’s dire for subsistence families. And, Cambodia is really poor…no discretionary cash around, live off the land sort of country.”
Bhavini: What makes this issue specific to Cambodia?
“Bad hygiene is everywhere. What’s particularly pernicious Cambodia’s 15 years war history. Including a 3 yr period of intense genocide where 25% of the population was killed including the educated elite which included doctors and basically anyone who could have narrowed the knowledge gap…communists really took it to a whole new level supported by the Chinese at the time. But, healthcare was completely destroyed overnight and you can kind of see it today. For a country of 15 million people, there’s only 3 hospitals serving that population, that’s 5 million people per hospital. And obviously geographically it’s unattainable and inaccessible. And of course why bad hygiene or sanitation is all over the developing world for the most part is because it relates to health education and basic hygiene understanding. In Cambodia it’s even worse because you don’t have solutions if you get sick; you don’t have a health clinic infrastructure. The government couldn’t care less. And there’s also a religious and cultural reason. It differs from country to country and I’m going to speak on behalf of those I don’t know. But, Cambodia’s culture is quite fatalistic; it’s entirely Buddhist. In that sense if you fall sick it’s probably because you deserved it, you did something bad in a past life, etc. If your child had diarrhea it’s probably because your ancestors are punishing you, not because you didn’t wash your hands or drank bad water…”
Bhavini: So, how do you infiltrate that mindset? Because you’re not dealing with the physical nature of the illness then but you’re trying to change mindsets, right?
“There’s multiple aspects to our work. We have a pretty big institutional aspect where we basically need to equip these institutions with the soap they need. Hospitals don’t even have soaps because of low budget and limited understanding of infection control. But you’re right, on the community level it’s 100% about behavior change. And you know what, it’s not an intervention you can do overnight. It is really just about reinforcing behavior over and over again. Getting people into that habit including in their purchasing priorities, like bar soap instead of alcohol, cigarettes, or more food for their family. It’s a difficult process, but that doesn’t mean we shy away from the challenge. It means we have to create a culturally relevant approach which includes members of their own community. So, we don’t import nurses from L.A to help out. We equip what we call Hygiene Ambassadors to sell soap, provide hygiene education and serve as a point person for hygiene for an entire village. We work on the government, for example, we did a hygiene health training for quarter-million people this year which included everyday re-enforcement activities and getting kids involved. When you do a very specific thing, there’s a 150 different ways you need to do it in. And we can’t cover all those today. I have realized that some cultural nuances can be barriers to change but to be as relevant as possible it’s important to acknowledge.”
Bhavini: Have you ever gotten questions about for example, the savior complex? How do you navigate that?
“First of all, we have 75 employees in Cambodia, all of them are Cambodian. It’s not like I’m flying to Cambodia and handing out soap myself. This I knew from the beginning wasn’t going to work. Actually now we’re launched in Laos, Nepal, and Rwanda which is led by Laotian, Nepalese, and Burundis. The savior mentality has maybe permeated from my leadership, if you will, to the locals who have adopted this particular mission or literally have been employed by us. So in that sense I want to say that we’ve softened the mission by adding a cultural familiarity to it. And I’m sure you’ve seen this in terms of your origination, but there’s a limited sense of urgency when you go to India or any slums. I went to Cambodia and people would be defecating openly. There’s no priority given to prevention at all. This is a crisis because I have a western perspective. But, for people who have been living this way for generations, especially if you’re a Buddhist it’s a part of life. So, I think we all have a savior mentality. I definitely have it. But, I would re-cast it as me trying to raise an urgency for a very particular thing that I don’t see happening, preventing a country from developing further. You can’t have a country develop further if the hospitals are completely overburdened with people seeking treatment for an antiquated illness.”
Bhavini: I think that’s a really good perspective actually. And, you bring up a good point. First of all, it’s very important to have a base there to have the community take initiative. Secondly, I also think it’s important to reshape the question which is that the west doesn’t have a monopoly over the idea of what progress is, right? If you have had access to specific things in life that has made you aware of these issues, traveling, going through academia, being able to transfer that and have community members that are receptive to it that’s a powerful statement. So what you’re doing is wonderful but what’s even more valuable is discussing your work in that context, it’s a new narrative I haven’t heard from other non-profit leaders in the developing world.
“Here’s also another thing, I read a lot on charities and social enterprises. 85% of what I read is negative about how charities work. There’s books like the White Man’s Burden and Toxic Charity and New York Times Editorials like The Myth of Women’s Empowerment, and I just want to push back on that briefly and respectfully in that people like news stories where things are all cheerful but what makes real and sharable news is something dramatic and catchy. We like to read stories about how UNICEF ruined a village in Africa because of their work or how the Gates Foundation’s 60 million dollars grant towards malaria actually went to support Somalis using bed nets as fishing nets; we hear these stories. But, we don’t hear the 95% of the other stories of that little NGO like Eco-Soap Bank doing work in a culturally relevant way. The New York Times isn’t going to write that editorial about Eco-Soap Bank taking this very patient and studious approach to working in Cambodia. We think badly about charities nowadays and we’re really into social enterprises like micro-finance because we’re so disillusioned with Save the Children. But, you know what Save the Children has amazing women’s empowerment projects in Pakistan. And, they don’t really get noticed. There needs to be a shift in how charity and humanitarian efforts are portrayed in the modern media.”
Sangya: I think the rise of sensational media on top of very aggressive media narratives depending on where it’s coming from push out all these stories to the margins. There’s really no coverage of it. And, it’s really hard for people to even investigate further if they’re not engaging or having deeper conversations with people who are involved in the field.
“It’s politics and it’s media. My friends really don’t really talk about this; charity has just become such an ugly word. I run a charity and there are social entreprise aspects to our work. Most of the soap we give out is sold so we resemble a business model but at the end of the day we still run a charity. And we do good work, if I may. But, I don’t see other people having this type of interest rather they’re interested in starting an app perhaps or moving to Silicon Valley.”
Sangya: I think it’s a matter of building effective systems. It’s not a matter of being a charity or a social enterprise and ending at that label. We have charities that aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing or are completely misguided. We also have social entreprises treading the same line. I think it’s a matter of individually evaluating, regardless of which legal structure you fall under, whether or not you’re doing what you say you’re going to doing. I’ve seen a lot of NGOs that aren’t as aggressive about metrics for measuring impact in a tangible way. Some are. It’s not necessarily because they’re an NGO. That’s the type of patience that most people don’t have, nor does the media. Because, it doesn’t sell…and I think we live in a generation where we need to know or have something immediately. It’s a matter of building coalitions and solidarity and finding the right voices in this field and really engaging together in this space.
“You’re right and that gives me a lot of hope. And it’s strange but a lot of charities are shooting themselves in the foot and trying to get a leg up on other charitable competition by saying ‘we’re not your typical charity because we do xyz’.”
Bhavini: How have you been received in the Pittsburgh community? There was an article out about how Pittsburgh has the highest density of non-profit organizations.
“It’s the weirdest thing in the world. I started in Cambodia which has the second highest density of non-profits per capita in the world. What’s in first place? It’s Rwanda and we’re open there as well. On a side note, post-genocidal countries have an influx of charities that come in after the war. To be in Pittsburgh and have this high density as well it’s like ‘what am I doing, I have to go to a place without all these nonprofits.’ From a foreign perspective though, a lot of our work is collaborative so our soap is used in every single province of Cambodia for example. We don’t have the capacity to transport the soaps out there and actually see that it’s being used effectively and sustainably. So large NGO networks help our mission and that’s why we have set up in Rwanda as well. Pittsburgh is a little fuzzy, the founding fathers of this city set a tone and mindset which unfortunately has percolated to the citizens here. There’s a lot of focus on Southwestern Pennsylvania. 100% of these major foundations have mandates to projects to just this region.They didn’t necessarily have a global perspective at the time and that’s ok. Setting up in terms of getting a board and getting people to advise you on NGO mechanisms, really super easy in Pittsburgh, there’s a lot of really nice people. People who have backgrounds in International Development, for example, not so much. People who are willing to invest and donate to international development projects, zero. It’s really not the right place to be headquartered but at the same time, somebody has to start. Somebody has to bring the world back to Pittsburgh and give people the avenue to get involved in global affairs again. So yea I can move to D.C and pay $3000 in rent or I can stay in Squirrel Hill and be comfortable while slowly pushing the needle on global involvement.”
Sangya: So how have you done that in Pittsburgh in a more tangible way?
“Not successfully. And you know what, it takes so much time. I can do so much so quickly on the cheap in Cambodia or Nepal just because of the scale of money. But, in Pittsburgh it’s such a slow process. You have to join a panel here and there; you have to have discussion awhile not knowing how many people will show up so it’s just really tough. And that’s one of the reasons I like International development because it’s quick and dirty. If a hospital needs 10,000 bars of soap, we can do that. But, to convince my fellow third generation Squirrell Hill-er that they should really learn about the Cambodian genocide, it’s not that easy; it’s not that satisfying…In today’s world you don’t need an office anymore. My board and people who handle the management side are all over the world. Honestly, headquartering here is just a way of saying, I like Pittsburgh and I’m staying here.”
“It’s interesting having a non-profit here. Almost every news outlet has covered us, we’re the poster child of international work especially because they like seeing a young Pitt student doing this type of work. But, no traction though.”
Sangya: I’m sure you had a lot of formative experiences when you were younger with your parents traveling everywhere especially to developing countries. So, it might have been a no-brainer for you to head down this path but there’s a lot that goes into starting something like this. It’s not just something you decide overnight. What was your journey like to begin this type of work?
“The reason it started was when I was working in these villages when doing my internship in the summer I saw a village mom washing her kid with laundry powder. Yes, viscerally we would all react to that. I saw that and couldn’t think of anything else. And in a cliche sort of way I had to do something about that particular thing. I went there with a completely different mission but transformed when I saw that and my focus shifted. I knew that I wanted to work in hygiene because it was such a quick and easy way to make families feel healthier by reducing illness rates. Diarrhea for a kid in the developing world is of course a matter of life and death but it can really bother their lifestyle overall. So I wanted to work in hygiene and eventually got to soap-recycling. And honestly, I was bored at school so I wanted to do something a little bit more hands on and constructive. So I started the nonprofit during my last 10 days of my three-months stay in Cambodia. I had some of my personal finances which I put towards an employee to collect and process the soap. But, more so it was me going from hotel to hotel asking for dirty soap and that’s how it started. Coming back to the states and jumping immediately back into school, I had to create a non-profit it, build it, and sustain it, provide leadership while doing school. And, I have no real good reason for doing that other than I was a little tired 4 years into school not actually doing anything.”
“What we look like right now, we have 9 branches around the world in different cities. And we hire women. So we 100% subsidize their wages to recycle soap. These are women who have some sort of disadvantaged background. It’s a pretty manual process to re-cycle soap. We have a fairly large prison program where we re-direct a lot of hotel soaps to prisons because the Cambodian government wouldn’t ever do that. We have a pregnant mother program in prisons as well. We have a large hospital and health clinic program. So we have 44 women recycling soap and 30 women that each live in their own village and work to sell our soap because we don’t want to make people dependent on free handouts and then they provide hygiene education. There are social entreprise aspects to the work. So today, it’s like a full non-profit. I’m constantly searching for funds, writing grants, trying to make it as financially sustainable as possible. It’s just like any other job except you have 75 employees and you haven’t met 80% of them.”
“One piece of news I hope would get featured here is that we got the top 10 CNN Heroes spot for this year. So that means I’ll be in the live T.V special in December. Right now we need votes. You can vote for hero of the year. It enables us to get $100K in grants. We want to hire a lot more women and open more branches in places like Ethiopia and Tanzania. From an environmental perspective, we reduce a lot of waste. Millions of bars of soap every year. We also collect things like bed linens, shampoo bottles, shaving kits, sewing kits, bed slippers, and process them if they need to be processed or redirect them to places like vocational schools etc. And to go back to an earlier topic, non-profits have been doing this work for a while and it’s not like they take money from a donor and give it to somebody random. I’ve had hundreds of experiences with on the ground Cambodian non-profits and they each have their own special thing because they work in and listen to the community and some have been there for over 20 years.”
Bhavini: Being South Asian, how has your work been received in the community especially given your unconventional career path?
“Honestly, we haven’t had it promoted within those spheres before. I grew us as an Isma’li — it’s a very specific sect of Shia Islam that has a living Prophet and it’s a pretty tight knit group. We have a lot of parallels to the Jewish communities. We both have roughly 15 million people around the world. There’s a large diaspora. We’ve been persecuted for our interpretation of Islam. It’s really interesting stuff. I have been promoted in those circles but unfortunately, I’ve received no support because we don’t serve people that look like them. Cambodians are Buddhist and East Asian. There’s this unfortunate issue of having a tribal aspect to charity. So we have not had success.”
Bhavini: I’m not surprised by what you’re saying, I think narratives like yours about taking an unconventional career route and making impact is important. And it’s like what you said, people in our communities don’t take these sorts of roles. I think people in our communities are afraid of taking on for example, charitable work. Because we’re driven by status and competition and it’s what we grow up with.
I think this generation is in an interesting place because we’re a sandwich generation. A lot of our parents came here with constraints. They didn’t necessarily have the level of autonomy like we do as a group — they were dealing with day to day survival and making sure their kids had access to education. To them security was defined by financial security. And I think that eventually took on the narrative of status in some way. Because we as a generation have access to education and have conversations that our parents necessarily didn’t it’s our job to find those connections and narratives so that we can inspire ourselves and the generation after us. Putting out stories like yours, especially in the South Asian community, is important.
“And, I don’t think this is something just within the South Asian community. There are lots of American parents that also appreciate status and going in the straight and narrow because they’re coming from the good place because they don’t want their child to suffer. First, I think it has to do with your age and what stage of life you’re in. There will be a point where we will be a little less free natured because we will have responsibilities we don’t have now. That transition will eventually come. But, that transition maybe won’t come as intensely as it did to our parents. But how much does that play a role in the dictatorial nature of our parenting roles in the future? If it’s diluted and I hope it’s diluted then that’s a good sign because that’s progress and we’re heading in the right direction.”
Vote for Samir for the CNN Heroes 2017 Competition before Dec. 12: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cnn.heroes/vote/
Website: https://ecosoapbank.org/
Email: samir@ecosoapbank.org
Facebook: @ecosoapbank
Twitter: @EcoSoapBank
