Somewhere in Honduras, a few children who have never heard of the Green Bay Packers have green and gold quilts wrapping them in warmth and comfort.

Child receiving one of Ronald MacDonald’s blankets. (Submitted Photo)

Those quilts are among hundreds created by Ronald MacDonald, a resident of St. Camillus Life Plan Community in Milwaukee. For about 15 years, his work has comforted children facing medical issues, with the quilts delivered by a Wisconsin-based medical mission charity.

MacDonald said a loved one had been volunteering with the nonsectarian charity Sharing Resources Worldwide, which helps organize and support medical teams in countries throughout Central and South America and West Africa.

“I said, ‘Well, I can do something,’ and so I started making quilts,” said MacDonald, who has been making quilts for about 30 years.

“I had been making quilts for places in Milwaukee [at] a couple other places where they could use quilts. And so, I said, ‘I’ll make them.’”

He has been sewing for most of his life, seeing it as both a career and a way to serve others.

“It’s just the talent, and if you get a talent, whatever it is, according to the Lord, you’re supposed to use it,” MacDonald said.

“He’s given me that talent way back in seventh grade when my grandmother who raised me, because my mother died very, very young. And my dad was an orphan too. I started on a sewing machine because my grandmother couldn’t use it, and I started doing easy things like just straight sewing, nothing fancy.”

A longtime tailor and sewer, MacDonald spent decades making children’s clothing and priestly vestments. His work for the Catholic Church sometimes involved dioceses in great need, including Biloxi, Mississippi, after a hurricane and flooding left the local cathedral with 11 feet of water.

“I called right down to the diocesan office because I heard that its churches were damaged. They said, ‘Ron, just make us white vestments, nothing fancy. We can use white for everything,’” he said.

“I literally made vestments day and night.”

Today, MacDonald makes about 35 to 40 quilts a year. They are among those Mary Dowling, a Madison resident who founded and leads Sharing Resources Worldwide, takes to children receiving medical care, often surgery.

“It means so much to the kids to have something like that to take home with them. And they’re so beautiful and colorful,” said Dowling, who recently returned from a medical mission in Honduras.

“He said he was going to quit, but he can’t. He sees the value in it. When we’re down there and we’re doing a surgery like we were last week, I send him a couple pictures of the kids in the recovery room with his quilt, and that gives him the impetus to just make more.”

Ronald MacDonald and his wife. (Submitted Photo)

That motivation only grows when MacDonald hears stories about the children receiving his quilts.

Dowling recalled an 11-year-old girl with a severe clubfoot who had never attended school because other children teased her. After surgery, the girl found some comfort in one of MacDonald’s quilts.

“She had the quilt before she went in [for surgery] and came back out with her in the recovery room. She woke up, and she looked down at her foot in the pink cast, just as straight as an arrow her foot was now,” Dowling said.

“All she could do was smile. She was crying before surgery. She was very nervous, very upset, but she was not upset after surgery. She had a pink blanket to go with her pink cast and a stuffed animal.”

MacDonald often provides a stuffed animal, too, along with a small signature on the quilt.

“He just puts a little bitty iron-on thing on it that says ‘Ron MacDonald,’” Dowling said.

(Submitted Photo)

For MacDonald, the quilts are another expression of a lesson he once shared with students as a teacher at St. Elizabeth School on West Burleigh Street in Milwaukee — and one that continues to guide him later in life.

“You’ve got to be open to the Lord, and when the Lord wants you for something, you’ve got to do it whether you like it or not,” he said.

“I would always tell my kids in school, ‘You can say what you want when you talk to the Lord. But the biggest thing that you have to remember is no matter what you started asking for, whether you got it or whether something else came up, you have to say thank you.’”

Go to  www.sharingresourcesworldwide.org for more on Sharing Resources Worldwide.