Two new mobile bakeries!
Bake for Ukraine has managed to get hold of two new mobile bakeries - after a real life detective mission to track them down…
Photo by Oleksandr Baron
What’s it like to star in your own detective story? Chance messages from an old friend, map references, aerial photos and mystery journeys. This is how the Bake for Ukraine team managed to track down two more mobile bakeries: a story of dogged determination and faith that somehow, it would all fall into place.
The first attempt to locate some did not have a satisfactory ending. Maria had got word that there were some parked in a field in Central Ukraine, not far from the city of Uman. There were some faraway photos, and if you zoomed in you could make out what looked like a group of them, huddled together in a meadow. Sasha set off there by car to investigate. Hopes were high: perhaps there would be two or three! Unfortunately when he got there, it turned out that none of them were in working condition. The big ovens had been chopped out and reinstalled inside brick and mortar bakeries, so at least someone was getting good use out of them. But the poor, gutted vehicles stood in their lonely field, no longer usable as bakeries. Sasha drove back to Odesa empty handed.
Maria refused to give up, constantly trawling the internet and message boards and listings on the sellers’ platform Olx. Then out of the blue, there was a message from Pavel, a friend who came from a seaside town near Odesa called Chornomorsk. He knew Maria had been searching for mobile bakeries and he had news. There were two, possibly three in the grounds of a Baptist church in a village in the far north of Ukraine, near the Belarus border. Maria immediately got in touch with the church: the bakeries were indeed there, they were run down but two of them were more or less intact, although they no longer had any wheels. The church pastor had become an Arny chaplain, and was often in the East, while the village was struggling to keep a small shop and bakery going amid all the electricity blackouts.
The team set off to visit them and check that they were in good enough condition to be repaired. There was a train to Kyiv and then a long car journey north, all the way to the village of Krasyatychi. The people at the church were kind and helpful; they had looked after the mobile bakeries as best they could, and most importantly of all, the ovens had not been cut out. They walked around and looked inside and checked that the generators and the stove worked: they needed a lot of work, but that could all be arranged. Maria was worried about what might happen in a place so close to that dangerous border with Belarus: what if Russian soldiers massed there again, what if they tried to invade? She wanted to take the mobile bakeries far away as soon as possible. The church insisted they didn’t want any payment - but the Bake for Ukraine team wanted to give them something to help the village, and offered to buy the large generator they needed to provide a reliable source of power for their main bakery and shop.
The next challenge was getting them all the way south to Odesa. Sasha, a man for whom no challenge is an impossible one, managed to hire the necessary trucks and special cranes to hoist the ten ton trailers on board, thanks again to the much appreciated support of Karsten Fuhrken and the charity Plich-o-Plich. They swung and pirouetted in the air on their chains, before being safely lowered onto the trucks, ready for their trip. There were some low-slung bridges to negotiate ‘a height restriction is just a suggestion’ - and many hours later Sasha’s convoy was finally on the outskirts of Odesa, manoeuvring the bakeries into a car repair yard, ready for the considerable task of making them roadworthy again.
And then another small miracle happened. A man called David Bauer, who ran a highly regarded heritage grain mill called Farm and Sparrow in North Carolina, contacted Bake for Ukraine. He had heard about the original mobile bakery and wanted to help. It was an incredible offer, one that gave real hope to the team who had almost lost sight of hope, after so many exhausting months in Odesa, where there were frequent rocket and drone attacks and most of the day was spent without electricity or internet. David set up a website and Instagram account called Bakers for Bakers, and set about recruiting all the American bakeries he knew to take part in a special weekend of fundraising, across Ukrainian Independence Day in August. Bake for Ukraine has provided them with recipes for palyanytsya sourdough bread, and a few Ukrainian cakes for the bakeries to make and sell. It moved Maria to tears, the thought of all these places across the United States, making Ukrainian bread. Even if we don’t raise a penny, she said, that alone would be a miraculous thing. But of course we are also hoping to raise some serious money, to pay for the two new bakeries to get wheels and brake systems and possibly a whole new chassis. Once they are fixed up, another challenge in itself, we can take them to the east and south, to continue the work of providing bread to communities in need.
