St Malo ‘bag ladies’ help homeless and environment

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This article was published 15/02/2019 (1901 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

They call themselves the ‘bag ladies’ and they’re hard at work on a project that is helping the homeless to stay warm and comfortable, while also keeping plastic bags out of local landfills.

For more than a year a group of about 10 ladies in St Malo have been getting together in the basement of the St Malo Parish every Tuesday and creating plastic mats out of simple grocery bags.

Those mats are now being handed out by a number of Manitoba organizations who work to help the homeless, offering those who get their hands on one something to lay down on or cover themselves with.

The idea to start creating the mats first came to St Malo resident Eveline Tougas after seeing an online video about two years ago.

“I was watching a video on Facebook and they were making mats for homeless people out of plastic bags and right away I thought I would try it,” Tougas said on Tuesday morning, while hard at work making mats at the St Malo Parish.

“The idea of it really excited me because it was doing two things at once, because it was helping the environment and also helping people.”

Tougas said that when she first began making the mats she did it by herself and learned quickly how much work went into making each one.

“It was a slow process,” she said. “I made seven mats during one winter and it took a good 20 hours just to make the first one.”

Tougas also realized how many plastic bags she would need if she wanted to keep making the mats, as she said approximately 650 bags are used for every mat.

Tougas, who said she has spent years trying to be environmentally conscious, said she likes making the mats because of the amount of bags it keeps from going to the dump.

“We’re saving a lot of bags from being thrown away,” she said.

She added plastic bags donations now come to them from all over southeastern Manitoba.

“Every time I meet someone I ask them to save bags for me because I am using them to make mats for homeless people and I think at first a lot of people thought I was a little cuckoo,” Tougas said with a laugh.

One of the women who joins Tougas every Tuesday to work on the mats is her friend Helene Lafantasie, and Lafantasie has also taken on the job of counting how many mats they make and how many plastic bags they use.

She said that in the time the ‘bag ladies’ have been getting together they have made more than 115 mats using about 75,000 plastic bags in the process.

With Lafantasie’s daughter Christine being a regular volunteer with the Winnipeg-based Bear Clan Patrol who regularly patrol the streets of Winnipeg’s most vulnerable areas and offer assistance to those in need, the group have recently been donating the majority of their mats to the Bear Clan.

The mats are gifts the Bear Clan Patrol said have been put to good use both in the colder and warmer months of the year.

“When Christine first reached out and offered up the mats, I really had no idea what they were going to look like and I was pleasantly surprised to be sure,” Bear Clan Patrol executive director James Favel said.

“I have seen community members use them to protect from the heat of the concrete on a hot summer day and I’ve seen community members sleeping on the boulevard protected from the grime of the street by one of these wonderful creations.

“They are a brilliant design, simple and practical and we are blessed to receive them.”

Tougas said she now hopes that residents in other communities who are interested in making the mats take the step and begin to make them so that more people can be helped and more bags can be diverted from landfills.

“My hope is that other communities will start doing the same,” she said.

For more information about the project, where to donate bags or how to create mats, call Tougas at 204-347-5903.