Soap Makers Keep Ancient Craft Alive

Mennonite Central Committee
Saturday, 14 October 2000

NIVERVILLE, MB--Soap making may be a dying skill in many circles, but a group of Niverville and area volunteers is keeping the ancient craft alive. Twice a year they hold a "soap making bee" in a Niverville barn and donate the subsequent bricks of soap to Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Manitoba.

On this balmy fall day, the pungent smell of hot lard lies thick in the air, as Clara Sawatzky scurries around the barn checking on the soap's progress. She says groups of Mennonites from the area have been making soap for MCC for the last 30 years or so. Sawatzky, who attends Landmark Evangelical Mennonite Church, started in the mid-'80s as a soap making novice but now helps coordinate the ongoing project.

Their process starts with pails of lard which are loosened in a large cauldron of hot water. The lard is next dumped into a second fire-heated cauldron. Sometimes tallow (a beef byproduct) is added to the mix. Once the lard has melted, it's again poured into a large pail, its temperature is checked, and a lye solution is added. This triggers the chemical reaction needed to create soap. A volunteer stirs the mixture until it thickens to the consistency of thin pudding.

The liquid soap is finally poured into rows of plastic-lined, wooden molds to solidify. "This will now be cut sometime in the night," says Sawatzky. "We come here about every two hours and check if it's ready." The volunteers use what looks like a giant cheese cutter to separate the soap into smaller blocks.

After four or five weeks of drying, it's ready for cleansing action. In total, some 30 volunteers here will produce approximately 7,200 lbs of soap in three days of soap making this fall.

Sawatzky sees it as a worthwhile act of service. "It's valuable at the other end--the recipients," she says. "Our soap is distributed by MCC. And they find the places where it is needed." In recent years, the majority of soap donated to MCC has gone to Russia. Other destinations include Serbia and Sudan.

"I also see it as recycling," continues Sawatzky, looking at the pails of lard donated by a couple of local meat businesses. "Who knows where the lard would go?"

"I sometimes think what would I do without soap. We have so much in abundance," says Helen Blatz of Steinbach as she stirs the lard and lye mixture. She and her husband Dan, who also lends a hand, are well-familiar with soap making.

But for first-timer Sher Sawatzky, it's an eye opener. "I've never seen soap made before," says the 32-year-old (who isn't related to Clara Sawatzky). "I didn't realize it was such a set-up like this," she says, surveying the veritable production line.

She came at the behest of her mother-in-law who worried the old skill may become extinct. "The younger generation, we lose sight of how things were done," says Sher, who attends Elim Mennonite Church in Niverville. "It's going to die out if no one takes this over. No one will know how to do it."

For Erma Friesen, who volunteered with MCC as a nurse in Haiti from 1969-71, the soap making skills she learned from her mother as a child help her continue to serve others. "It's a mission work I can do here at home."

For more information, or to contact Mennonite Central Committee, see their website at: www.mcc.org