March 9, 2011
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Bind Us Together: White Cross Bandages
My church has a small but active women’s fellowship group, and one that strives to meet its White Cross quota. White Cross provides material aid to American Baptist missionaries all around the world, including the US. It’s most well-known for rolling bandages, something that goes back to its World War I roots.
They’re still needed. Our bandages go to to the Evangelical Hospital in Vanga, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Our missionary team, Dr. Bill and Ann Clemmer, coordinate the medical residency program and surgical care for stigmatized women; their high-school daughter coordinates a books and scholarship program.
Dr. Clemmer has said that their bandages are boiled and re-boiled and used until they fall apart, and feels the reusable products is one way the hospital keeps costs down.
So we are happy to help. At my church, we usually have a setup where we have sheet rippers (second-hand but clean are fine, as well as any print or pattern, as long as they’re cotton or cotton blend), sheet pinners, sewers, and rollers. But here at the House of the Broken Metatarsal it’s tough to get to church, and even so, I can’t use the right-footed sewing machine. So after the bags of torn strips came to me.I decided to sew them together by hand; I like hand-sewing, and I didn’t want bags of strips bristling with pins around the house. I used a split stitch, typically an embroidery stitch; I always use a doubled thread when I hand sew. It’s one step forward
, a half-step back, which locks the stitch well. Of course, the smaller the stitches, the better the seam.Then it’s time to roll the bandages. My church actually has wooden crank roller, hand-made two generations ago. We also have those skilled rolling on pencils or by hand. My rolling is in the not-too-bad category.
The bandages should be 4″ wide and 10 yards long. We use our coffee-hour tables to measure our strips. They’re six feet long, so five strips make 10 yards. (Late edit: not this time. Our ladies just ripped the length of the sheet, which I think is more common. So these strips are more than six feet long, and it takes only four strips to make a 10-yard roll.)I’ve been told that the White Cross web site will be updated with directions for bandages, surgical masks, and instrument wrappers. Anyone who can rip and sew should think about helping out White Cross.
