Volunteer Jeanne Young knits plastic milk bags together into bed mats and tote bags for people in Haiti.
Ottawa volunteers are giving their time and skills to help people left homeless by Haiti’s earthquake while also recycling.
Members of local organization the Good Companions have met weekly since May to make bed mats and bags out of old milk bags and send them to Haiti.
Schools and community members donate washed bags by the hundreds. Volunteers cut the larger outside bags into strips to make plastic yarn – or “plarn” – and crochet them into bags and mats.
Volunteers from the Good Companions and other groups have so far sent 750 mats and 79 bags.
In Haiti the mats are used as an alternative to reed mats that often become infested with insects. The mats are also used as surgical beds in hospitals. The tote bags are filled with medical supplies by hospitals and aid agencies like Doctors Without Borders and given to new mothers.
“It’s a new project. It’s different,” says Jeanne Young, a retired bank worker who has been volunteering all summer and fall.
About 15,000 work hours and 200,000 milk bags have gone into the project, says craft co-ordinator Linda Janes-Peddle.
Janes-Peddle brought the project to the Good Companions when she took the job in May. The idea to send their work to Haiti was inspired in part by a presentation put on by a Good Companions member who went on a trip to Haiti.
When the earthquake hit on Jan. 12, 2010, hundreds of thousands of Haitians were left homeless.
Nearly two years later, thousands still live in semi-permanent tent cities, put up by the Haitian government and international organizations, where disease is common and sanitation is poor.
Their recovery has been slow because of the scale of the crisis and political deadlocks, says Andrew Thompson, an international relations professor at the University of Waterloo who travelled to Haiti with an Amnesty International fact-finding team.
“Politics are getting in the way of humanitarian relief,” says Thompson.
The demand for the plastic mats is huge, says Janes-Peddle.
But small-scale projects and donations might not be the best way to bring relief, says Thompson.
Sometimes projects like these flood the market and undermine local producers, he says. Some agencies ask donors to give money that can help the local economy instead of sending clothes or blankets, says Thompson.
But Janes-Peddle says the mats have impact. When volunteers delivered the first shipment a boy layed on a mat widthwise with his feet sticking out, she says.
“Why are you lying like that?” asked the volunteers. “Because of my two brothers, can you make the mat wider?” said the boy.