Desperate for bread

Our Bake for Ukraine team in Mykolaiv say the situation in the villages where they deliver our bread is like nothing they’ve seen before. Link to our latest fundraiser at the end of this article.

The situation has never been more desperate, our volunteers tell us: they deliver bread to villages in Mykolaiv and Kherson regions - in areas which come under drone attack, which are mined, where roads are more like dirt tracks where many aid organisations simply won’t go.

Last week they were taking a regular delivery of our Bake for Ukraine sourdough to a village just inside Kherson region. Drones had flown there earlier that day: people were fraught and exhausted. For the first time, our volunteers said, some people began pushing and shoving in their effort to get hold of the bread: one woman who had been waiting burst into tears when she realised there wasn’t enough left. It was distressing in the extreme.

I went to see our volunteers a couple of weeks earlier, when they were trying out the new indoor bakery space which Bake for Ukraine had made possible, purchasing bread ovens, racks and other essential equipment and shipping it to Mykolaiv. The volunteers at the DOF centre, where our mobile bakery is based, had been struggling to bake outside in the freezing temperatures this winter, when repeated Russian strikes had put heating and light out of action for days, then weeks in a row. Our Bake for Ukraine volunteers immediately leapt into action, sourcing and then purchasing everything the DOF team needed to build a new bakery inside their building.

They had decided to inaugurate the ovens by baking honey cakes to take to children in the villages where they deliver bread. The recipe came from another friend of Bake for Ukraine, Willem Fennema, a Dutch baker who is often based in Ukraine helping various humanitarian causes and has spent several weeks with our volunteers in Mykolaiv, teaching baking skills.

Mykolaiv bakers testing cakes

Anya and Maryna had made six different variations of honey cake with different spice mixes, syrup, flours and levels of sugar. I took on the tough challenge of helping them taste all the cakes and pick a favourite.

A couple of days later they sent photos from their latest delivery with smiling children excited to be given such delicious cakes.

But behind those images lies a truly challenging reality for those residents, in places where there’s hardly any infrastructure, no shops or medical clinic, unless a mobile service manages to visit. The long cold winter of blackouts and relentless Russian attacks is almost intolerable.

These villager are people who our volunteers know by name. They know their family stories, what kind of food they like, what their hopes are. It is terrible to see people so desperate that they are in tears for missing out on bread.

Here’s the situation in their own words…

“Situation in the Villages

Our team has returned to villages in the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions after a break, bringing bread to the people there. The welcome has been warm everywhere we’ve gone.

No one else is delivering free bread to these communities. In villages that have shops, bread can be purchased. In villages without shops, residents must travel to the nearest neighboring settlement to find any at all. The majority of those who remain are elderly.

When our team began arriving again after the pause, people argued — and sometimes came to blows — over whether there would be enough of our sourdough bread to go around.

In one of our most recent stops, the village of Kvitnyove, a woman broke down in tears because she hadn’t received an extra loaf. She is ill, and ours is the only bread she is able to eat. We promised her that next time, we will make sure she gets an additional loaf without fail.

We had never witnessed anything like this before.

People express deep gratitude for the Darnitsky sourdough bread and speak longingly of our white bread — which, for now, we are unable to bake for them.

Drone attacks in the region have intensified significantly, both day and night. We are seeing more and more destroyed homes. The roads are also mined.

Our team delivered bread to the village of Tavriyske in the Kherson region following a daytime drone strike. The residents were visibly moved and relieved that we had made the journey to reach them.

We have received calls for help from the village of Pravdyne in the Kherson region, but it lies in an area of near-constant drone activity and remains extremely difficult for our team to access safely.”

People are staying in their homes. And we continue to bake bread for them.

Our bread goes where it is needed

A lot is spoken about Ukrainian resilience, as if Ukrainians have some magical stoicism, built to withstand anything. They are certainly tough people who have lived through terrible hardship and learned to survive it, but they do not have magical superpowers. Our Bake for Ukraine team live in Odesa, under shelling, without light. They have sleepless nights hiding from drones in the corridor, they must snatch whatever sleep they can in the grey light of dawn, and start their day with the thought: who needs help today? And what can we do to make that happen?

We were promised a grant many months ago, to keep our work going. It will be wonderful and lifesaving if it arrives - but as yet we are still waiting for all their due diligence to be completed.

Our bread is always welcomed

In the meantime I have launched another JustGiving fundraising page to support Bake for Ukraine and our work in Odesa and Mykolaiv into the summer. That delivery to the Kherson village showed how vital it is, more so than ever. The volunteers make fresh, nutritious sourdough breads to traditional Ukrainian recipes. They deliver it to people who truly need it. It is not more complicated than that. We are so very grateful to those who already subscribe here and support us at a time when so many causes compete for attention - if you have any capacity to donate directly to this fundraiser - we would be truly thankful.

Here is the link again - JustGiving