Cooking Teams

The team setups for cooking are a bit unusual but they work. I'll explain. The baker kind of has his own hours that usually start way early in the morning and finishes up around midday...nothing really unusual there. Right now the baker takes Wednesday and Sunday off. Before the baker used to take the weekend off but made sure and had enough backup bread in the freezer to last thru the weekend.

Then we have 2 or 3 people on salad team which usually runs 8-5 Mon-Fri. But our cooking teams, of which we have two, work 2 on-2 off- 3 on- 2 off- 2 on- 3 off...confused? It looks like this. Team one works Monday and Tuesday, then Friday, Saturday, Sunday, then Wednesday and Thursday of the following week...that's a two week schedule. Team two works the alternating days. Their schedule on each team starts at 8 in the morning and ends about 7 at night. Oh its not that bad if you think about it...two fifteen minute breaks one at 10am and another at 3pm(approximately) then usually an hour for lunch and an hour for dinner.

We also have devotions (devo's for short) or some kind of meetings every morning Mon-Fri so that is another half hour deducted from actual physical working time...and they do work hard! But if you subtract the breaks, lunch and dinner break, and devo's you eliminate 3 hours from the 11 hour shift which brings it nicely back to an actual 8 hours physical work time. The stress and heat of it can can make it feel like 12 hours straight sometimes.

In addition to that at least one person is dedicated to being ward cook on each team (cook for local patients on the ward) because if the locals ate our food it would probably give them some extra grief adjusting to a new diet so we have a local person cook local food for the locals, sounds like it makes sense doesn't it? (at least locally right?). Also a dedicated dishwasher (this usually takes two sometimes) and two storeman because a crew and local workers of this number/multitude eat a lot of food and we don't have the privilege of ordering food every week from a local supplier who can meet our demand. So most of our stores are in months supplies stored in the bowels of the ship. Including 4 walk in freezers and a walk in cooler/fridge/reefer as well as a few upstairs (mini versions).

Back to the teams...

Instead of calling them team one and team two, lets change the name so in case they read this post/blog they won't start teasing each other about who's number one and number two.

Right now we are actually staffed right in the galley, dining room needs more workers.

Team Fried Chicken consists of the following nationalities: Ghana x2, Guinea x1, Canada x1, Australia x1, Liberia x2

Team Water Melon consists of the following nationalities: Australia x1, US x1, Ghana x1, Guinea x1, Hong Kong/Canada x1, Liberia x2

Salad Team consists of the following nationalities: US x1, England x1, Liberia x1

Storeman consists of the following nationalities: Ghana x1, Canada x1

Baker consists of: Germany x1

So you see its a very diverse group of teams I work with daily, and its constantly changing.

I'll get more into my role later on...don't want to put you to sleep all at one time.

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