HASTINGS -- The idea came to Andrew Vrbas as the crowded old bus, which tilted precariously on its shot suspension, wound its way through the Andes Mountains in southeastern Peru.
The Kansas native was a year out of high school and had spent nearly three hours each day traveling from his host’s home in a small community outside of the city of Cusco, the former capital of the Inca Empire, to the school where he taught English to children.
Flooding had drowned out the tourism industry for the season, putting many people out of work.
People needed jobs, and he wanted to help.
A thought surfaced as he sat on the bus thinking about jobs and modern amenities often taken for granted in the states.
Soap.
From that simple thought grew ambitious dreams of putting people to work producing millions of bars of soap and providing a wholesome product to schools that would improve the lives of children and protect them from disease. Hand washing is a simple way to help prevent pneumonia and diseases associated with diarrhea, which kills about 2.2 million children younger than 5 around the world each year.
Four years later, those bubbles of thought have burst into reality.
On Oct. 31, Andrew and his wife, Abi Vrbas, a McCook native, traveled from Hastings where they had founded a growing organic soap-making company, Pacha Soap, to Burundi, a country in southeast Africa that is one of the five poorest in the world.
There, they helped establish a small soap-making factory in Kamakara, home to about 2,400 refugees from Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Andrew and Abi took along equipment for the new business and brought in a soap maker from a neighboring town to teach techniques and sales. Andrew and Abi taught them about using locally sourced plants and essential oils to create different scents, colors and textures.
Back in 2010, when Andrew first decided to dedicate himself to making the world a better place through soap, three small issues stood in his way. He had no money to get started, no idea how to make soap and no business experience.
He returned to the United States and Hastings College and devoted himself to learning the business of soap. There, he met Abi and took her back to his dorm room to show off his latest batch of homemade suds. She liked the idea and became his partner in both life and business.
Today, she oversees promotion and social media for Pacha Soap.
They started small, selling bars at the Back Alley Bakery in Hastings and at a coffee shop in Atwood, Kansas, which is about 15 miles from the farmhouse where Andrew grew up. The venture, with its message of entrepreneurial philanthropy, grew quickly.
Pacha Soap now has a staff of six, including Andrew and Abi. The company makes and ships soap from the back room of a building in downtown Hastings to more than 200 stores from South Carolina to Oregon, including to the chains Whole Foods Market and Natural Grocers.
Several large blue barrels full of sustainably sourced palm oil stand next to three tanks where ingredients are mixed to make soap. The smells are strong -- rosemary, mint, orange, eucalyptus and ginger. Blocks of freshly made soap are cut with wire and dried in cabinets that once served as wardrobes in Hastings College dorm rooms.
For every bar of soap sold, Pacha donates a bar of soap to a school in an impoverished country. But Andrew and Abi wanted to do more. They wanted to create jobs. They had tried to set up a soap factory in South America but struggled to find local partners with which to work.
Then they found Imagine Burundi-Terimbere, a foundation established in 2012 to help empower Burundians, mainly women, by teaching them how to create their own handcraft businesses. Working with the foundation, the people of Kamakara had gotten together and voted on three businesses they wanted to establish in town, a cassava mill, a barber's shop and a soap-making shop, which turned out to be a perfect fit for Pacha Soap's business philosophy.
Andrew calls it Raising the Bar.
“We believe in business as not the problem of society but maybe the answer to a lot of problems of society. Commerce, if done right, if done morally, can be a great way to solve societal issues,” Andrew said. “We believe you can have a successful business and do good.”
The Vrbas's plan to work with the new soap shop established in Kamakara to provide soap to schools in the region.
During the several days Andrew and Abi spent in Burundi, they visited schools that will receive soap to talk about hand washing and played games with children to teach them about germs. Some of the children in the area go to school simply because it's a place they can get a regular meal provided by the United Nations World Food Program, Andrew said.
“There are 1,200 kids at this one school we went to, and they had four toilets, just holes in the ground. No sinks, of course no soap,” Abi said.
In addition to Burundi, Pacha Soap has donated soap to schools in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, Dominican Republic, Rwanda and Sri Lanka.
Andrew declined to say how much of the cost of a bar ($6 on the Pacha website at pachasoap.com) goes to provide soap to schoolchildren, but he said it's enough to pay for manufacturing, distribution and education.
To purchase products from Pacha Soap, click here.
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