NEDERLAND, Texas — A 94-year-old Nederland woman and her daughter have been turning out hand-made cloth face masks for the past three weeks.
When Wanda Hollier, 60, of Nederland, learned that people were making the masks to help with a shortage of masks around the country she knew just who to call.
She picked up her phone and dialed the woman she knew could help. Her mom.
Martha Chance has been sewing since she was a girl and it would be safe to say in her 94 years she has sewn miles of seams.
The 94-year-old, who took her daughter’s call on a landline, does have a mobile phone but doesn’t do the internet so she told her daughter to search for instructions on making the masks.
Hollier came across just what the mother and daughter needed in the form of a YouTube video put out by the Deaconess Health System in Evansville, Indiana.
After watching the video the pair worked out the kinks while making their first few masks and then really got to work.
Chance and her daughter took turns sewing the double layered masks on Chance’s 60-year-old sewing machine according she said. While one sewed the other cut fabric.
Three weeks later the mom and daughter team had made roughly 1,000 masks according to Hollier.
The Centers for Disease control recently advised all Americans to wear cloth masks when out in public to help keep from spreading the coronavirus.
On Monday they dropped off a batch of about 50 masks at Baptist Hospital in Beaumont. Holier told 12News it probably took them most of a day to make them.
Non-clinical staff at the hospital are wearing the masks to save personal protective equipment, or PPE, for medical staff providing bedside care according to Baptist Hospital spokesperson, Mary Poole.
The first batch of masks they made went to a local clinic and some have been sent as far away as New York and California.
They’ve been sent to doctor’s offices as well as nursing homes and some were donated to the neonatal intensive care unit at Christus St. Elizabeth Hospital in Beaumont according to Hollier.
“She prays over every mask we make,” Hollier told 12News on Tuesday.
Chance looks at making the masks and donating them to healthcare workers as her duty in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. It’s a fight that she looks at as if it was a war.
“You’re not gonna charge a soldier for his gun,” she says, adding, “ I’m just answering a call for our country.”
