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Niverville, Man.
Soap makers keep ancient craft alive


Soap making may be a dying skill in many circles, but a group of Niverville, Man., 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 Manitoba.

Clara Sawatzky holds up a block of soap. Blocks of soap line the shelves behind her. MCC News photos by Bruce Hildebrand

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. Sawatzky, who attends Landmark (Man.)

Lillian Falk and Ferd Sawatzky preside over a cauldron of melting lard.

Evangelical Mennonite Church, started in the mid-1980s as a soap-making novice but now helps coordinate the ongoing project.

Pails of lard are loosened in a large cauldron of hot water. The lard is dumped into a second fire-heated cauldron. Sometimes tallow (a beef byproduct) is added to the mix. Once the lard has melted, it’s poured into a large pail, its temperature checked and a lye solution is added. This triggers the chemical reaction needed to create soap. The mixture is stirred until it thickens to the consistency of thin pudding.

Finally, the liquid soap is poured into rows of plastic-lined, wooden moulds to solidify. “This will now be cut sometime in the night,” says Sawatzky. “We come here about every two hours to check if it’s ready.” 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. In total, 30 volunteers will produce about 7,200 pounds of soap in three days 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, soap donated to MCC has gone to Russia, 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, Man., as she stirs the lard and lye mixture. She and her husband Dan, who also lends a hand, are well-familiar with soap making.

However, for first-timer Sher Sawatzky (not related to Clara), it’s an eye opener. “I’ve never seen soap made before,” says the 32-year-old. “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 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.”

 – Carol Thiessen, MCC Manitoba

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Last modified December 3, 2000.

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