SearStone, a distinctly different continuing care retirement community in Cary, has partnered with Davis Drive Middle School students to help the sick and wounded as part of a global health initiative.

Davis Drive’s Odyssey of the Mind team is helping to recycle old sheets donated by the Umstead Hotel and Spa and turning them into bandages and arm slings. They are being helped by the residents of SearStone’s Brittany Place, a health care center for those needing assisted living and skilled nursing care. So far, these productive students and their senior friends have made more than 1,000 bandages to send to countries in need via Global Health Ministries.

Odyssey of the Mind is an international educational program that provides creative problem-solving opportunities for students from kindergarten through college. The “Odyssey Angels” learned about the following concepts through the bandage project:

- Recycling: The project helps the community recycle large bags of donated linens and reuse as much linen as possible. The strips are the full length of the bedsheets and roughly 3.5 inches wide.

- Community Engagement: The project partners students and seniors. The residents enjoyed having students visit while using their time to make something useful.

- Global Health: The bandages are sent with larger medical supply shipments to hospitals in various countries. The bandages are used as external covering to help the sick and wounded in multiple ways, such as slings or covering the wounds of burn victims. The hospitals and health care centers in many countries prefer these types of bandages because their quality is far better than what they can access locally.

- Creativity: The students designed a system and built a simple, small machine that rolls the bandages more quickly and more tightly than rolling by hand. Over time, they have modified the design to add rubber bands and increase the tension.

“The residents of Brittany Place have enjoyed the partnership with these special students, and especially enjoy the opportunity to impact the world in this small way,” said Activities Director Shona Wynn.

For more information about SearStone, visit www.searstone.com. Visit SearStone’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/SearStoneRetirementCommunity. For more information on Odyssey of the Mind, visit www.odysseyofthemind.com. Visit www.ghm.org to learn more about Global Ministries.