Every day, hotels discard tens of thousands of barely used bars of soap. One local man is on a mission to collect some of that soap and use it to help stave off disease in underdeveloped, war-ravaged regions of Africa.

Elliott Phillips' mission began last fall, when the retired Army signal corpsman was flying back to Maryland from Germany. On the plane, he read a story in Stars and Stripes about the Global Soap Project. It told the story of a Ugandan man whose charity recycles used hotel soap to send to refugee camps.

"I read that article and said, 'When I get home, that is what I am going to do,' "...