Bread for the people

An update on our Bake for Ukraine mobile bakeries - and an insight into a recent trip to see the Mykolaiv bakery at work

It was a bitterly cold December day when we pulled up at a car repair yard on the outskirts of Odesa, to see the two mobile bakeries which Bake for Ukraine managed to acquire last summer. They need a complete refurb, including new wheels which have to be specially ordered from Switzerland, where the mobile bakeries once did service with the Swiss Army. We are able to carry out the work thanks to the magnificent fundraising efforts by bakeries in the United States, led by David from Farm and Sparrow mill in Asheville, North Carolina, a community badly affected by flooding in September.

The mobile bakeries - which came from a small community bakery run by a church in the far north of Kyiv region, near the Belarus border - looked a bit rough around the edges, but basically intact. Importantly the ovens and generators were in place, even if the chassis and wheels would need to be replaced: this week we got word that a set of wheels is ready to be transported from Switzerland, by one of our friends who regularly drives lorries of aid to Mykolaiv and Kherson. It shouldn’t be too long now before bakery number two is mobile again.

Next on our agenda was a proper trip to our original mobile bakery, which continues to work away in Mykolaiv, baking sourdough palyanytsya and rye bread to be delivered to villages in the region and across the border into Kherson.

We had a special guest with us, the wonderful Cemre Uker, who was voted Miss Turkey Supranational for 2025, and does a lot of wonderful work for humanitarian causes. She has a special link to the Mykolaiv and Odesa regions through the charity which her father runs, the International Blue Crescent, which operates a number of community shelters and food distribution centres. Cemre had contacted us on Instagram asking if she could come and spend time with our mobile bakery, and we organised a three day trip to help with the baking and delivery to residents in de-occupied villages which have been left largely destroyed by Russian shelling.

Our Bake for Ukraine volunteer Oleg, who acts as the mobile bakery manager, came to lead the baking effort, along with two wonderful bakers from Kherson. Oksana somehow manages to run a volunteer bakery in the city, despite the constant shelling and now FPV drone attacks on civilians, and Bake for Ukraine has been glad to provide her with financial support every month to keep her ovens going. The other lady from Kherson had fled to Mykolaiv during the occupation, leaving her home and bakery job behind. Her daughter had joined the army, and had been injured by a mine: 'it's been a nightmare', she said - but she still showed up to volunteer and we did our best to make sure she enjoyed baking with us.

It was a freezing cold day, and began raining around 20 minutes after we arrived, turning the ground to thick mud - and inevitably the mobile bakery's generator broke down. Luckily the church provided an extension lead long enough to connect to their electricity supply, so the dough mixer could start working after all. The wood fired oven made it toasty warm inside, and Oleg did an incredible job talking Cemre and our Kherson bakers through the bread recipes, and set up a neat production line dividing and shaping the dough. The local Suspilne TV news turned up to record some interviews, somehow managing to squeeze inside the narrow bakery space to film everyone at work.

By lunchtime, while the bread was proofing, there was time for a break, and Cemre drove me over to see the Invincibility Shelter run by her father's charity across town. There was a fantastic space, warm and bright, with plenty of room for people to sit and recharge their phones, get some hot drinks and a free lunch cooked by the team. That day, there were freshly baked bread rolls and vegetable soup, warming and delicious. The bakery unit which they had set up alongside was turning out hundreds of rolls and baton loaves, which get delivered to villages in the region: the whole operation was really impressive.

Making sourdough is a slow process, and it was late at night by the time the final loaves were pulled out of the mobile bakery oven and piled up into crates to cool down. It was the end of a long but productive day, as we carried them inside the church and stacked them along a row of long tables - there must have been around 300 loaves, rye and white - ready to be delivered the following day.

An aid group from the Netherlands arrived the next morning with their delivery van, and we loaded up the crates of bread to drive to the village of Partizanske, about an hour away in the northeast of Mykolaiv region. The village was occupied and left badly damaged by Russian shelling - destroying 90 percent of the homes, a school and cultural centre and leaving it without electricity or water supply. But a couple of hundred residents have managed to return, thanks to volunteers and charities which are helping to rebuild these shattered homes. The village council building has been restored, and we went inside to meet an amazing group of women who are running the place: the electricity supply is back, so they insisted on making us some tea while they showed us the space they had created for children to play, and a makeshift health clinic where a nurse or volunteer doctors can see people with minor ailments or psychological stress.

Bread is delivered to the village once a week, and it didn't take long for word to spread that we had arrived. A large crowd quickly formed outside our van, and we handed out enough bread to everyone to last them for the next week: our sourdough keeps really fresh for days, especially the one with rye. Many of them were pensioners, arriving on bicycles - smiling and waving as they cycled away with their precious cargo of bread. It is incredibly distressing to see these broken villages, so much loss and destruction - but also a source of hope and inspiration, to witness the strength and resilience of the Ukrainians who are determined to carry on their lives, and to rebuild what Russia has destroyed. If we can help by providing nutritious and freshly made bread - then our mission is complete. Thank you to everyone who supports our journey and our fantastic volunteers who give so much of their own time to keep the bakery and the deliveries going.