Turning Fabric Scraps Into Hope: How Abbotsford Traditional School Is Supporting Patients in Cameroon

A high school sewing class, a staff-supported home in Chilliwack and a hospital in Mbingo, Cameroon now share an unexpected connection through a simple but impactful idea: turning leftover fabric into essential care items.

Each semester, students in the Abbotsford Traditional School (ATS) sewing elective create projects such as cotton flannel pyjamas. These lessons produce large amounts of fabric offcuts, pieces too small to use for additional student work. Rather than sending the scraps to the landfill, staff began looking for a way to repurpose them.

Around this time, ATS staff learned of a supported living home in Chilliwack involved in a humanitarian project supporting a hospital in Mbingo. Residents at the home were sewing baby blankets, cloth diapers and wound-care bandages for the hospital's maternity and medical-surgical wards. The bandages must be made from 100 percent cotton flannel and cut into 10-centimetre squares.

This created the perfect solution. The flannel scraps from the ATS pyjama project matched the exact material needed for the bandages. Students collected, sorted and donated the offcuts, ensuring the fabric could be put to meaningful use rather than discarded. The residents at the supported home now sew the donated pieces into soft, washable bandages alongside the baby items they already produce.

Through this partnership, materials that would have been thrown away are contributing directly to patient comfort and care. The collaboration also helps students see the real-world impact of their classroom learning: their sewing projects support a local community program, which in turn supports health-care teams and families on the other side of the world.

What began as a question about fabric waste has grown into a simple but powerful chain of support connecting Abbotsford, Chilliwack and Mbingo. Students gain hands-on skills, residents at the supported home participate in meaningful work and the hospital receives supplies it relies on every day.