This 21-Year-Old Hopes To Change The World A Bar Of Soap At A Time

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — A 21-year-old is hoping to use soap to change the world, one village at a time.

For Chapman University student John Cefalu, it all started after a volunteer trip to Kenya a few years ago.

It was there he says he saw poverty and conditions he had never seen before.

On the last day when he was leaving, he says a little boy ran through the village to say goodbye.

"He came and hopped into my arms and started crying, wearing my sweatshirt, saying 'You gotta come back.' That was the realization moment that, 'I'm gonna do something else besides just come back. He's gonna be able to rely on me for more than my friendship," he said.

It was a promise he would keep.

Cefalu was 17 then, and along with football and getting ready for college, he had a bigger mission.

Now, at 21, it has turned into a nonprofit called Health 2 Humanity, an organization that teaches people in developing countries to make and sell their own personal care products.

"It gives them the means necessary to supply hygiene to themselves, the people in their community, and be able to actually sustain themselves financially to be able to wash their clothes, to be able to wash their hands, to be able to wash their body," he said. "We're seeing these illness rates go down and the length of clothes lasting go up. It's just incredible just what just a simple bar of soap and a simple laundry bar of soap and all these things can actually do."

Cefalu started making each soap by hand in his grandmother's kitchen. Now, the soap is made by a factory.

For every bar sold, 100 percent of the proceeds will go back to the businesses he is setting up overseas, teaching people to buy supplies locally, make products, and sell them.

So far, "we've created economies within these tiny little villages, orphanages, and community centers that people can really grab onto and rely on and stand behind," he said. "It creates a hope for these people that a lot of them have never seen."

Cefalu says he always imagined a life in football, not one like this.

But, when he looks back now, when he sees fields, he sees fields of gold all across the whole world.

"That hope is that our world is connected enough that we're all watching out for each other," he said.

For more information, click here. To donate by buying soap, click here.