Laura Marchment will celebrate her 99th birthday in November.
The oldest resident at Birmingham Retirement Community in Mount Forest, Marchment is the driving force behind a project that sees milk bags turned into mats for use in Haiti.
“One day at church, last winter, I got up to thank our congregation for bringing in milk bags for my Me to We Club to weave into bed mats at our weekly meetings,” said Donna McFarlane.
“Laura Marchment, despite her age, never misses a thing. The next day Laura started calling me wanting to know details about how they could get this going at Birmingham.
“Early on some kids from our club went over (to Birmingham Retirement Community) after school to work with the seniors and once they came to the school. I would love to keep this relationship going. So, we kept making mats at the school and several women at the lodge really got it going there,” she said.
“When the school year ended the ladies finished off the ones we had not completed so I could clean things up for the summer.”
During the recent Active Aging Week celebrations at Birmingham Retirement Community, Marchment and her cohorts demonstrated how they weave the mats, using looms made by Ron MacEachern, and had a phenomenal 53 finished mats on display.
Each mat is composed of six sections of woven milk bags, sewn together, each section containing 900 milk bags.
“That’s over 4,700 milk bags that we have used,” Marchment said. “Saving them from the landfill site. I can’t believe it.”
Milk bags are donated to the project by individuals and through schools and churches. Birmingham Retirement Community has a bathtub full of bags waiting to be woven into mats.
“It doesn’t cost anything to make the mats, just some time,” Marchment said, “and it’s great because sometimes we have nothing to do so we just stop and do a little weaving.”
Among a dozen or so residents helping Marchment with the weaving is Mary Sheehy, the retirement community’s second oldest resident. She is a year younger than Marchment.
Randy and Susanna Kraemer and their children, from Glen Allan, attended the special presentation at the Birmingham Retirement Community.
They are members of Mennonite Gospel Missions (MGM) Canada and promised the finished mats would be included in a crate being sent to Haiti later this fall.
“It’s nice to see so many folks involved (in making mats from milk bags),” Randy Kraemer told the gathering.
“I was just in Haiti a month ago where some of the (mats) were distributed.”
He said the MGM Canada works alongside churches in Haiti to hand out the mats and other supplies to the country’s poor.
He showed photos of people lying on the mats, including children in a school for the deaf sponsored by the organization.
“There are many deaf children in Haiti for some reason,” Kraemer said, “and the mission sponsors 100 students in a boarding school there. These mats get used at the school as well – rows and rows of bunk beds with two or three mats per bed.”
“It’s a good thing because if you weren’t doing this, the milk bags would end up in a landfill and plastic doesn’t disintegrate,” he said.
“The lifespan of the mats is fairly high and they are better than the rags and old mattresses, which attract bedbugs and rats … which people would be sleeping on instead.”
Kraemer thanked the Birmingham Retirement Community residents for their donation of milk bag mats.
“I encourage you keep on doing what you’re doing,” he said.
“We have much to be thankful for, when you think of what we have compared to others.”
