Let them eat bread!

On the road with Bake for Ukraine in Mykolaiv region - bringing our freshly baked sourdough bread to the villages which we help. What a journey!

As you drive east out of Mykolaiv into the countryside beyond, you pass mobile fire teams positioned under treelines, ready to combat any incoming drones. The car slaloms down the roads, avoiding potholes, sometimes swerving down dirt tracks cut through the edge of fields, kicking up clouds of dust. The villages we were visiting with the Bake for Ukraine team were waiting for their delivery of bread: not many relief organisations travel there because of the poor state of the roads.

One of them was a small village called Zoriya which I remembered going to three years earlier with friends who had their own NGO based in Mykolaiv. In 2023, the village was still being made safe by demining teams, while the authorities were trying to restore electricity supplies. I remembered clambering through a shattered building which had once been a kindergarten, and another which had housed a village community centre, the roof torn open to the sky, the corridors blocked by rubble.

This time as our car pulled up there was already a small crowd of residents waiting, some of them wearing brightly coloured headscarves and smart blouses. Our bakers at the DOF centre in Mykolaiv, Anya and Karina, had been busy baking three kinds of sourdough loaves - white, wholewheat and a dark rye fragrant with malt and caraway. They had loaded up around 300 loaves into the back of a car driven expertly by one of the DOF centre volunteers - enough to give the residents a proper choice of bread, some agency in a world where so much has been destroyed and snatched away.

A small boy marched up to the car and proudly carried a stack of three loaves of bread back to his parents. Pensioners rode up on bicycles, laughing and chatting to each other as they packed bread into their panniers. For the DOF volunteers it was a chance to connect with residents in a village new to them, who they want to get to know properly; delivering aid isn't just about dropping off food and driving away. 

We left Zoriya and had to drive almost all the way back to Mykolaiv before turning off down a different road and heading to another small village called Kvitne. It was this village where residents had been desperate for bread after the DOF volunteers had been unable to travel for several weeks during the coldest of the winter weather, when energy blackouts and treacherous driving conditions made it impossible to bake or deliver bread.

This time we drove there in glorious sunshine, stopping for a moment beside a beautiful lake with tall reeds and wild birds swooping around the sky. The kind of tranquil scene which Ukrainians should be able to enjoy everywhere. The remaining bread was soon distributed to Kvitne's residents - one lady happily tearing off chunks of the dark Azovskiy bread straight away, declaring it delicious. 

The day did not end there: after the long drive back to DOF where our other young baker hd been hard at work all afternoon, Anya and Karina helped to mix up the dough for the next day's batch of bread - and then sorted out some food for our dinner: slices of Azovskiy bread, of course, and some fermented cabbage and beetroot which they had prepared the day before, along with some hard boiled eggs, fried potatoes, salo and chopped up cucumber. I made everyone laugh by bringing out the rest of a tub of hummus which I had bought in Odesa, which I knew would go perfectly with the dark bread. 

Mykolaiv is now a city full of life, a perpetual long queue outside the newly re-opened McDonalds like a symbol of faith in its future, couples strolling up the middle of the long central pedestrianised street, children playing on scooters, jazz musicians riffing outside a cafe. But it is also a city mourning too much loss and heartbreak - the four long years of war which are already bleeding into five. Raising money to help those most affected is always an uphill struggle, but it is one which we - and many others - continue to make.

We are so grateful to all our donors including subscribers to this substack and my JustGiving page, the International Relief Fund, the Association of Ukrainian Women and the Lantern Project.