Mobile bakery update!

A report on progress so far - deliveries in Mykolaiv region and some fantastic work by our London volunteer Alex!

An update is due, on the work of our Bake for Ukraine volunteers - as I sit here in the London newsroom, unable to stop scanning Telegram channels every time there is an attack on Odesa, and trying to work out how soon I can get back to Ukraine. But we have progress to report and our team has been hard at work.

After the magnificent fundraising effort by our baker friends in the United States, we now have enough funding to repair the two mobile bakeries which we managed to track down in the north of Kyiv region and bring by truck to Odesa. Once the funds have been transferred with all the necessary paperwork, which seems to be a slow process, we will then be able to pay the mechanics to do the repair work. It takes a special kind of mechanic to take on the challenge of fixing such unfamiliar vehicles, which were built for the Swiss Army several decades ago, but luckily a former member of the Swiss Army has reached out to us, who actually spent his military service working on one of them as a baker - and we are very grateful for all his advice and expertise.

Until we get these into road worthy condition, our original mobile bakery is busy operating in Mykolaiv where our friends at the Baptist Church are being incredibly helpful, allowing us to keep it there in their grounds and helping with deliveries of the bread. A couple of weeks ago our superstar volunteer baker from London, Alexandre, who owns the Today Bread cafe in east London, came out  on his third trip to support Bake for Ukraine. He spent a week in Mykolaiv on the mobile bakery, where as well as baking hundreds of loaves, he helped to train some local volunteers to make the sourdough bread on board, and did some excellent development work with our Darnitsky rye recipe, which is very nutritious and will keep well for several days.

Alex with our Mykolaiv baker

Along with Olha, who is now part of the Bake for Ukraine team in Odesa, they went out to some damaged villages in Mykolaiv region, and just inside Kherson region, to deliver the freshly baked bread. The families who returned there after the area was de-occupied are trying their best to rebuild those damaged homes, but there is very little infrastructure there and nowhere to buy food, let alone fresh bread. They were delighted to get the delivery of sourdough palyanytsya from the mobile bakery. One lady was so happy to see it that she kissed the loaf and kept smelling it for several minutes - saying it had been such a long time before she had held such delicious bread in her hands. There were elderly people and young families with children and all of them need support from aid deliveries to keep them supplied with basic supplies and drinkable water. They are constantly worried about what might happen if the Russian front lines creep further forward again. 

Villagers happy to get our bread

We also continue to support bakeries which are still providing free bread to people in need, and are currently sorting the transport to get a donated bread oven to friends at the Peremoha by Liubov bakery. It’s no small feat for these volunteer bakeries to still be baking free loaves after more than two and a half years of full scale war. Our baker friends Yaroslav and Yurii, from the Khatynka Pekarya bakery in Bucha, have both now joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Yaroslav’s mother is now running the place for him, and on their social media pages they are promoting a fundraiser to buy drones and electronic warfare systems for Yaroslav’s unit. This is the reality of life, trying to run a small business and keep things going - in the midst of this latest drive to mobilise more defenders.

Thank you to all of you who are supporting our journey at Bake for Ukraine - thank you for your trust and donations - we will do our very best to keep supplying good quality and freshly baked bread to the communities who need it most.