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Winnipeg, Man.
Doctor values MCC bandages


When Dr. Frank Duerksen began working at a remote leprosy hospital in Paraguay back in 1969, he quickly discovered the value of a simple gift.

Homemade cloth bandages, sent to Paraguay by Mennonite Central Committee, were certainly unsophisticated as medical supplies go. However, Duerksen quickly warmed to the bandages as he used them to wrap the wounds of leprosy patients.

An MCC cloth bandage is wrapped around the wrist of an elderly patient in a hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan. MCC Photo Pearl Sensenig

“That was all we had,” he said recently. “We had no commercially-made bandages at all.”

Now 30 years later, Duerksen is associate professor of orthopaedics at the University of Manitoba’s medical college and chief of hand surgery service at the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg. He still travels regularly to Brazil and Paraguay, teaching and helping to establish leprosy treatment centres.

He still swears by the MCC bandages. “You couldn’t put a price on it. They’re invaluable. Without them we couldn’t do it,” says Duerksen, adding that locally-made bandages are poor in quality and ones from Canada are expensive.

Last June, MCC’s material resources warehouse in Winnipeg sent a shipment of 409 kg of bandages to Km 81, the MCC-supported leprosy hospital in Paraguay where Duerksen works. A similar shipment, with other medical supplies, is shipped there every three or four years.

MCC’s cloth bandages have been used around the world for years. For instance, in 1998, MCC sent 7,779 kg of bandages to Bangladesh, Haiti, Nicaragua, Russia and Serbia.

Strips of cloth from clean cotton bed sheets and pillow cases are measured and cut and then sewn together and wound into compact rolls. Once collected at the various MCC offices, the bandages are packaged and sent overseas in 50-gallon drums.

Bernard Gomes, an MCC worker in Bangladesh, says that health care workers there find MCC bandages better than those available locally or used in government hospitals. Because bandages are scarce and expensive, they are sometimes washed and used again.

MCC bandages find a wide range of uses as well, from securing mosquito netting to holding up trousers. While some might question the sterilization of cloth bandages washed and dried in the sun, Duerksen is comfortable with their re-use. Anything is cleaner than an oozing wound, he says.  – Carol Thiessen and Delphine Martin

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Last modified January 11, 2000.

© 2000 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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