Anna Bowles visits Mykolaiv’s Mobile Bakery
Anna Bowles, who volunteers and blogs her travels in east Ukraine on Substack wrote this report of her recent visit to Mykolaiv:
Mykolaiv oblast (region) was de-occupied almost three years ago, but many villages are struggling to recover. A visit from the mobile bakery can be a highlight of the week.
A lot of readers will be following my fellow volunteer Felicity Spector’s excellent substack about her volunteer work in Ukraine, or have read her book Bread and War, about food and resistance in wartime Ukraine. Back in September, she invited me to stop by the mobile bakery with her.
Felicity (far right) and Alex (back right) with local volunteers and staff.
Felicity: The mobile bakery has been in Mykolaiv for more than a year now – after we brought it there from Odesa. The first location was in the grounds of a baptist church in the north of the city, which was able to supply water and electrical power and other facilities – we were really grateful to them for hosting it. Then we were able to move it to the current location, the DOF [the former House of Naval Officers, now a humanitarian NGO] centre in central Mykolaiv, as there were more volunteers there who wanted to learn how to bake and were also able to deliver the bread to villages in Mykolaiv and Kherson regions.
We’ve had terrific help from the DOF centre team, and two bakers from the UK and the Netherlands have spent a number of weeks in Mykolaiv training up the volunteers there to make sourdough bread and developing our recipes so that they work really consistently in the mobile bakery conditions. It’s quite a tight space and we want to maximise efficiency. We use recipes for traditional Ukrainian sourdough: a white palyanytsia bread, a wholewheat seeded bread, a Darnitsky rye and most recently a dark malted rye which will last for as much as three weeks. We call it Azovskyi bread.
Willem Kaleb Fennema from the Netherlands lent us a big dough mixer which is far more efficient than the one we had on board, which was incredibly helpful, and he also spent several weeks teaching and mentoring our Mykolaiv team. He came up with some extra recipes including the malted rye and a honey loaf cake which we can make at Christmas time and for children.
Our great friend Alex Bettler who owns sourdough bakeries and cafes in London has also been to Mykolaiv numerous times, training and working with the volunteers and going on deliveries with them to the villages. He’s also been fundraising and baking for us at his London bakery Today Bread in between those visits. What a superstar.
Left: Felicity, myself, Alex. Right: ‘Bread and War’.
We originally had a grant from International Relief Teams in the USA which enabled us to bake around 7–800 loaves of sourdough a week which were then delivered to villages which are hard to reach – some have no tarmac roads – so other aid agencies don’t manage to get there. The DOF team have a really good relationship with these villages and they know exactly what is needed on the ground.
People in the villages are always really happy to see the bread delivery arriving. They really appreciate getting this good quality, nutritious bread that’s been baked by hand and will keep well without going stale. It’s a taste of home and family in villages where so much has been destroyed.
We have a second mobile bakery in Odesa which is about to start work there. As ever the challenge is keeping up the funds so we can pay for flour, generator fuel, petrol for delivery cars and payments to our bakers. But there is no shortage of goodwill and we are so thankful to everyone who helps us and donates to our work!
The bakery looks after its volunteers: here’s Anya (left) making pizza for lunch and Marina (right) serving it.
Marina and Anya are both members of the bakery team.
When the full-scale war started, the situation was terrible, but some international organisations like the World Food Program were helping. What’s the situation now?
Marina: When the full-scale war started, there were no shops, no bread, no eggs. People organised groups, wrote about where to get food. It’s better now, but there are still no shops. Yes, there is a wholesale trade. But people can’t necessarily buy food once a week. And when we come, a lot of people meet us, as if it were a big holiday for them.
Obviously some villages have recovered. But there’s still a difference between ordinary bread and our sourdough bread!
Are there other charities supplying bread, or is it just you?
Marina: Yes, there are other charity foundations, though some villages say their programme has closed, and we don’t know why. The large organisations don’t bring bread to the small villages. They have big cars [which can’t cope with badly damaged roads] so the small villages suffer.
Just last week we accidentally got lost and came to another village. A ghost village, completely destroyed. We didn’t expect to find anyone, but it turned out five people live there. Such villages badly need support and help. People want to restore everything: their animals and houses, but there is no food. Go literally just a couple of metres out of the village, and you’re in a minefield. That’s how things still are here.
How many times do you visit each village a month?
Anya: Twice. Obviously we’d like to go more often but it hasn’t worked out yet. There’s eight we go to systematically. There’s a few more, four I think, which we’ve been to once or twice, because we can’t cover everywhere. At the start of the project there was a village we went to but the road was so bad our car broke down, and we can’t risk that any more. Although people really need bread there. It’s a big village. With the number of vehicles we have, we can’t cover it anyway.
You used to go to Kherson oblast. Is that no longer possible [because of safety restrictions due to drone attacks]?
Anya: We go. There’s basically no roads there, but we made it in and people were very happy. They don’t have any water, they’ve got nothing, It’s dangerous, but there are people there. No matter what, they need help.
At checkpoints the soldiers warn us that it’s dangerous, there’s drones flying around, there might be incoming. But… you have to help people.
Left: Alex and Marina inside the bakery. Right: Alex with some freshly baked bread.
Alex the London (though originally from Switzerland) baker was on a week’s trip to Mykolaiv while I was there.
What brought you to Ukraine?
I met Felicity one day in London, and [through her] discovered Bake for Ukraine and decided to come here. I don’t like to always just give money to charities, I also like to see what they do in reality and help with my hands.
You’ve been here five times, now. Each time has it been different or are you doing much the same thing?
No, it’s changing slightly because the project is evolving. The first time we started to use the mobile bakery was in Odesa, where we were giving the bread to the local charity organisation. This is the second time I’ve been to the mobile bakery in Mykolaiv. Now there’s two more mobile bakeries so the idea is to see where they’re going to go and how this is going to evolve as well.
You yourself visit the affected villages?
Yes. It’s amazing, because you can really understand why people need bread because it’s completely destroyed. When you see the smiles on the faces or the light on the eyes in people who you give bread to it’s so valuable.
Is the funding situation getting more difficult?
There’s a need for transition. Before there was a lot of help and support from charities around the world. Now it needs to become more commercial and more self-sustaining. That’s where I think maybe I can help a little bit is because I run a business […] We need to make we need to find a way to make money here, though I don’t know exactly how; and to engage with donors in Europe so they can understand what we’re doing. Funding is never easy, but we need money to be able to give the bread away for free.
Find out more about Bake for Ukraine, and how to support their work at https://bakeforukraine.org
Read and subscribe to Anna’s blog here
