My Cooking Team

My job here on the Mercy Ship is Assistant Cook. We cook for approximately 350-400 people a day. There are two cooking teams that rotate 2 days on and 2 days off and 3 days on. The next week you work the opposite schedule while the the other team fills in on your days off.

Here is the list of international characters that make up my food services team (in no particular order).

William, from Australia, is an Assistant Cook. His wife is working as a nurse in the hospital ward. He is an extremely nice, soft spoken guy who makes a very funny comedy team with Jean (below). We are sad to see him leave for home this week.

Patrick is from Ghana and has been working for several years on board as an Assistant Cook. He aims to be a chef one day. Every two weeks we serve African food which is my favourite and is often Ghanaian. For all of you who love spice, West African children grow up on spicier food than we generally eat as adults in the West.

Jean is our Frenchman from Guinea and works as a roving Assistant Cook/Dishwasher. His job is actually construction, but since the ship changed from Sierra Leone to Liberia at the last minute the land projects that were planned were delayed until next year. Jean is always laughing, eating meat, and talking on the phone. That is frozen fish he is holding in the picture.

Freddie is from Ghana and is the Store Room Team Leader. This is an important job as the kitchen is on deck 6 and the vast quantities of food are all stored on deck 2. Almost all of our food is brought in large shipping containers that arrive every few months from the United States or Holland. Freddie goes out to the local markets and buys enough bulk produce to feed 400 people a day. He controls our access to food and decides what fresh food we eat by what he brings up to the kitchen each day.

This is Daniel (Liberia) and Sonia (UK), our Salads Team. Daniel is our soft spoken kitchen joker, extremely hard working, and fun to chat to. Sonia is a Salads Queen. We often only get tomatoes and cucumbers, but she manages to make the most elaborate salads from these and a few random tins of things. I am mightily impressed.

Dara (USA) is a part-time member of the Salads Team (although was running it entirely before the above two arrived). She is a down to earth, no-nonsense, person who is great to chat to when you are slicing 2000 tomatoes. Our Food Services Manager is married to her and they have 3 kids with another on the way!

From Liberia, Foday is our dishwasher. Now I thought he was a young pup until he told me he had 4 grandchildren, multiple children and is in his late 50's. Not to say that 50's are old, but the speed that he works (and never slows from) is that of a young 20 year old. He surprised me the other day by saying his wife just had another baby the night before. Wow! He named it after Peter, our Food Services Manager, "so that it will grow up to be big and strong too".

Ernest is from Ghana and our team leader. He is the person we ask for jobs when we work. He is laid back and has been working on board for 5 years. Always making sure we get our breaks, he even lets me make desserts when we have extra time. He and Patrick are a great source of cultural understanding and information on West Africa for me. They have their foot in both worlds and are very willing to gracefully let me know what is or isn't kosher.

Ophelia is our Ward Cook. Someone took the time to realize that the last thing patients need is strange foreign food when they are in a foreign environment trying to recover from surgery. Ophelia is from Liberia and cooks the most amazing looking food...a lot of spicy meats, so I am out of luck as a vegetarian. She is very passionate (and dramatic, which I love) and being 5 ft or shorter I am always crashing into her because I have my head looking forward at my 5'10" height.

Peter is our Food Services Manager from the United States. He is in and out of the kitchen, dining room, and also serves as a fire fighter on the ship. His background includes head chef of an Italian restaurant before making a career change to fire fighter. He and Tyrone (next picture) plan our menus. Peter has implemented ice cream parties every time a food services staff leaves for home. Yay, Peter!

Tyrone is our Head Chef from Alabama, USA who works Monday to Friday with both cooking teams. He is a "quirky nutter" (as the English would affectionately say). I have rarely seen a head chef that doesn't bark out orders when in full meal deadline. One can immediately see he loves cooking and gains his energy from it, getting more nutty, but always relaxed, as the day wears on. Cooking comes easily to him. His wife Stephanie is an Intensive Care Unit and often Recovery Nurse (when there are no ICU patients).

Tyrone has a great kitchen blog called AFM Menu: Crumbs from Our Table that allow staff on board to see our upcoming menu, comment on the food, and vote for favourites. It also has explanations of why we do thing certain ways in the galley, why some foods have bugs, why we don't offer other foods, and generally a direct contact to 400 recipients of our days' work. Any foodie would like it, regardless of being in Liberia or not.

He and Stephanie also have a blog at tyroneandstephanie.com which actually has a game of Pacman on it.

This is Albert, our German baker. He starts work at 2am every morning. He bakes us fresh croissants, baguettes, buns, bread, meringues, fruit cake, and even tried "American cookies" (as he calls them). He is a quiet man that is always busily baking away when we come in each morning to start.

Eddie is our newest addition. He is our next baker and pastry chef hailing from Hong Kong and Canada (even better...Vancouver). He will replace Albert for a year next month as Albert leaves. For the moment he is cooking on the other team, but is in the galley on my team's days experimenting with marzipan, caramel, chocolate, and all sorts of other delicious items. YUM!

Downstairs a level (deck 5) is the dining room and the Dining Room Staff (also on 2 teams). Our team consists of 6 people. Pictured here are Casey and David, both from the States and both great guys. We don't have a lot of interaction with "dining room" as we send all the hot food down in its own in an elevator.

Lastly we have the rest of the Dining Room Staff. From left to right: Mary (USA/UK), Ingela (Sweden), Abby (Australia), Jemima (Liberia). On the far right we have Josh (Canada) who works the storerooms with Freddie.