Hays girl builds homes in Nicaragua by selling homemade detergent

Reece Leiker, 13, Hays, with a bottle of her Pure Roots laundry detergent.

By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post

Thirteen-year-old Reece Leiker has a pretty nice life — what you might expect of a typical American teenager. She eats well. Her parents live in a nice home in Hays. She has nice clothes.

But when Reece was 11, she learned there were people in this world who did not share that life. Something in her heart compelled her to help.

Leiker, now, 13, is selling Pure Roots homemade laundry detergent to raise money to build homes for the poor in Nicaragua.

Leiker has joined forces with her parents. Leiker alone has raised almost $49,000 to build eight homes in the impoverished country. Together, she and her family have built 14 homes in Nicaragua.

Her parents first took up the cause after they attended a seminar in February 2016 by advocate Dani Johnson of King’s Ransom Foundation. According to the nonprofit’s webpage, it helps build homes, assists orphans, provides clean water and rescues children from sex trafficking around the world.

Reece Leiker looks out a window at dump in Nicaragua. She said seeing children eat from the dump changed her perspective on what it is to be poor.

Taryn Leiker, Reece’s mother, said the family had contributed to many causes in the past, but as they researched these charities, they found very little of the money was going directly toward assisting the people they wished to help.

Taryn Leiker said she and her husband, James, were drawn to the Nicaraguan project because 100 percent of their investment is spent helping the needy. They learned there is great need. Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the western hemisphere only behind Haiti.

Taryn and James initially donated enough money to build six homes in Nicaragua. Each home costs about $5,200. The King’s Ransom Foundation leverages matching Nicaraguan funds to stretch donors’ dollars.

Reece visited Nicaragua with her parents in January 2017.

“It completely changed how I saw things,” she said, “because I saw kids living out of the dump, eating the food that was in there. When I came home, I felt so bad, because I was here eating gourmet food and eating food from the store and not from the dump, so it really changed how I saw that.”

King’s Ransom builds homes that are above the standard required by the Nicaraguan government. They include plumbing, a bathroom and a kitchen. Each home can house five to seven people.

The foundation also tries to establish families with a sustainable income. They might provide chickens, which the family can sell, eat or use to produce eggs.

Taryn said providing chickens can be life-changing for a family. Most poor families in Nicaragua earn $2 per week.

“When one of them would get really sick, they would say this person needs protein,” she said. “An egg can be 75 cents, but it is a full day’s walk to where they can actually purchase an egg. They lose an entire day of an income. (They) walk two ways that takes them an entire day to spend almost 50 percent of what they can earn in an entire week, hoping that is going to bring back the health of someone who has basically gotten to the point they are so malnourished they can’t function.

“It might sound like, ‘So that’s a chicken,’ but the impact that can have is huge for some of these families”

Reece knew she wanted to help, but she had to find a business model that would maximize her return. She wanted to make loom bracelets, but found her return on investment would be low.

Reece and her mother, Taryn Leiker, with a man who makes lamps out of sea shells to sell to support himself.

A family friend suggested homemade laundry detergent. She had been using a store brand, and was not satisfied with the results. The friend tried the homemade soap and found it worked better and was cheaper.

The ingredients are simple: Borax, Arm & Hammer washing soda and Fels Naptha, a recipe that has been used for more than 120 years.

Reece’s dad had a motor oil stain in a shirt. The homemade laundry soap pulled the stain out in five washes.

The return on investment was also higher. She could make 25 bottles in an hour.

Her homemade detergent is also more eco-friendly because instead of plastic packaging, Reece packages in glass bottles, which she recycles.

“It wasn’t about me,” she said. “It was about how we could best help the poor.”

Reece set her sights high — five homes at a cost of $27,000 within the first year. She reached that goal in seven months, more than her mother used to make in a year.

“It just goes to show that we limit ourselves and anything is truly possible if we are just willing to follow the simple steps that it takes to get somewhere,” Taryn said. “This was not something that we have done and encouraged her to do. We just put things on the table to see what she would do with it.

“We would make a comment and see if she would run with it. This is really who she is coming out. We are just creating an environment in which she just knows there are no limits — that she is capable of anything. We are just coming alongside her in any way we can.”

The poor of Nicaragua salvage everything they can to make a living. This swan was made by a young man who dug the paper out of the dump to create items to sell to tourists.

Reece said she can see God working through Pure Roots. The first week she sold her soap at the Downtown Hays Market, she ran out of bottles. The family prayed about it. Someone donated 100 bottles that were just sitting in a basement.

Reece still sells her detergent Saturday mornings at the market. She also accepts monetary donations for her project. Reece’s project is sponsored by one of her parents’ businesses, so 100 percent of the proceeds from the sale of the detergent goes to assisting the poor.

One bottle of Pure Roots detergent costs $6, three bottles $15 or five bottles $20. The number of loads one bottle will make depends on the type of wash machine you own. One ounce is required for high-efficiency wash machines and two half ounces for top-load washers with agitators. One bottle should last about 20-25 loads for the high-efficiency or 10 to 15 loads for a top loader.

People interested in buying detergent or donating to Reece’s cause can also reach her on Facebook.

Reece said helping the families in Nicaragua has brought her peace, and she hopes to be a missionary when she is older.

“It really hit me hard that there were people in the world who were not as lucky as me—who didn’t get to eat, who didn’t have Nike tennis shoes, who didn’t have clean water, who didn’t have homes, who didn’t have air conditioning,” she said. “It was really sad, and I knew I needed not to be somebody who just sat around and said, ‘Too bad, somebody will help them eventually.’ I just needed to step up to the plate and do what I knew I needed to do.”

Reece continues to set lofty goals. Combined with her parent’s initial investment, Reece homes to raise a total of $104,000 to build 20 homes in Nicaragua.

Unfortunately, Nicaragua is experiencing political strife right now, and King’s Ransom has had to divert some funds that it would normally invest in housing to feed people. At least $20,000 a week is needed to fund the food relief effort at this time.

The unrest started as protests over tax increases to fund the country’s pension system, but international journalists are reporting escalating violence in recent days.