A visit with a church matriarch of service and Christian love.

Our granddaughters Esther and Emmeline are 5 and 3 years old, respectively. For the past two years we have celebrated their July birthdays at their neighborhood park along with their little friends and parents.

The children dress for water play in a little water feature that runs through the park in Topeka, Kan., try out the park’s playground equipment, laugh loudly at their parents’ version of the birthday piñata—throwing water balloons at established targets, including their father, eat off the grill their father fires up, and finish with a great birthday cake designed and decorated by their mother. We usually provide the watermelon.

After we have eaten, the girls’ mother brings out the bright, colorful, Mennonite Central Committee fabric bags—so much better than the wrapping paper that stuffs our landfills. The children line up beside the boxes where they’ve placed their pencils, tablets, erasers and other MCC-prescribed school supplies purchased for the birthday party. Each with a colorful fabric bag open to claim its contents, and helped by adults to fill a bag with the right numbers of pencils and other items, the children stuff the bags, which then become school kits for other children.

I help Emmeline, who seems proud to accomplish the task herself this year alongside her older sister. It is becoming a wonderful birthday tradition, this little parade. As I watch the girls’ mother loading the 34 school kits the children had made, I wonder, Who makes all those fabric bags?

Leona memories flooded over me. I turn 65 this year, and my favorite Sunday school and Bible school teacher is 100. I remember when I was an exchange professor in Chengdu, Sichuan Province in China, with MCC-related China Educational Exchange in 1984-85. Leona’s instruction on China’s people and Mennonite missions in China came back to me.

I still see our little class of 10-year-olds in Bible school gathered around the globe, with Leona poring over the continents, tracing a finger from China round to the United States, then examining a larger map of China’s huge land mass and, finally, Leona’s careful instruction about Chinese ways and Mennonite missions. It was better geography instruction than I ever remember receiving in school.

Many years later, Leona told me that after she first taught school with a provisional certificate immediately after graduating from high school during the terrible Dust Bowl years in the Oklahoma Panhandle, she had so wanted to finish college and be properly certified for teaching, but she married, they bought a farm, she raised her sons and time moved on.

I believe she poured that need to teach into us, the children she nurtured at Turpin Mennonite Church. She is still teaching all of us as the church matriarch and model of service and Christian love.

And so, I went home to see Leona last year at her home, Emeritus at Liberal Springs in Liberal, Kan. Tiny and spry as ever, still filled with energy, thoughtfulness and caring for others, Leona was downstairs in the foyer to greet me lest I get lost climbing all those stairs to find her apartment.

Leona began sewing the fabric bags for MCC school kits as part of her role with the Women’s Missionary group at Turpin Mennonite Church more than 50 years ago. The women’s group purchased the cotton fabric that Leona and her friend Luella Schmidt used to sew the school kit bags in those early years. She thinks the cotton seemed heavier when she began than it is today. Now, because Leona no longer drives, other women buy the fabric for her.

“Do you want to see them?” Of course. She pulls from beneath her bed a box and counts out 21 completed bags, stacked neatly into the box of bags still in process. Then she gestures toward the boxes stacked under her desk in the corner of her bedroom. She figures there are two or three times as many completed bags in the stacked boxes waiting to go to MCC. When I ask her to estimate the number of bags she makes in a year, she shrugs. “Oh, maybe one or two hundred.”

I’m sure that estimate is low. Even so, if she has sewn 200 bags each year for 50 years, that is a sizable number.

“How are your eyes, Leona?” She acknowledges that at age 99, they are growing weaker. She can’t thread the needle on her machine any longer, and her neighbor down the hall helps as Leona needs her. Then she chuckles.

In 2010 she decided to piece a quilt, “just a simple nine-block quilt” with the scrap material left from all those school bags. A friend machine-quilted it for her, and she liked the way it turned out.

When her oldest son, Franzie, and his wife, Dorothy, came for a visit, she proudly displayed the quilt on her bed. Franzie shook his head. “Oh, Mom,” he said, “you should never have done that. Now, Dennis [Leona’s younger son] and I will fight over that quilt when you’re gone.”

Leona could not have squabbling sons, so that Christmas she gave them each a quilt. The grandchildren announced that they were next in line. So, in her 90s, she pieced six quilts from school bag scraps after doing four more for her grandchildren in 2011 and 2012.

The doctor advises her to save her eyes by resting them for 10 or 15 minutes during occasional breaks from her work. She does some reading and would love to read her Bible more. She has a large-print Bible, but she notices her eyes’ weakness most when she reads.

Driving back to Topeka from Oklahoma, I remember that I should send Leona pictures of Esther and Emmeline and their friends filling the MCC school kits at their party.

Leona needs to know how she is passing on the MCC school kit tradition, continuing to educate children from the Oklahoma Panhandle, where she began with children like me, to our granddaughters and friends in the Kansas City area, to the many school kits she has helped MCC send to children being educated around the world.