Foodservice in a Third World Environment

Every year, the week before Easter, hundreds of American teens and their leaders descend upon the town of Mexicali, Mexico to do a wide variety of work. Many work with the children of the area, teaching a springtime edition of Vacation Bible School, leading songs and crafts, playing soccer, and giving dozens and dozens of piggyback rides. They also devote one day during the week to community service. Some build roofs, repair schools, repaint at the zoo, play basketball with inmates in the prison, and many other tasks. These teens give up their spring break, or a week of school, and their adult leaders give up a week of their precious vacation days, to spend this time working for others.

This massive attempt at helping those less fortunate than most Americans is put on by Azusa Pacific University in the Los Angeles suburb of Azusa, California. APU provides the groups with a plowed field, where the groups pitch their tents, eat their meals, worship, study, and build relationships with one another when they're not working in the community. In 2007, 1,400 people came to work in the community. It's a big enough project to be the leader of a group of 20 or so students, arriving to do teaching, games, craft, and community service projects in the area. Each team brings its own tents, tools, first aid gear, teaching materials, even drinking water and bath tissue. They come prepared to rough it, to work hard, to serve the needs of others, instead of partying into the nights all week.

But, allow me to take you into the background, into the world of the camp staff, who make this event possible. The camp staff provides organization for the groups. They identify the churches who need a team to assist them in their work. They identify the community service projects that are in need of doing each year, and assign each team of students to one that best fits the tools and abilities available to each team. They make arrangements to have American food and water shipped in, so that the kitchen crew has safe food and water to use for preparing meals and cleaning up after meals.

The security team, a unique part of the staff, provides safety and security for the groups, both from problems that come up within camp and from those outside, who would come to injure and steal. They sit four-hour shifts, twice a day, guarding each of the four gates and roaming around camp, keeping watch over everything that happens, day and night. They do not leave their posts while they are on duty. Safety is vital. They check the identification of each person who leaves and enters the camp. They watch carefully for dress code violations that could attract the wrong kind of attention among the locals. They handle the verification of identity of Mexican nationals who are permitted on the property, such as the local diplomats and politicians who help make Mexico Outreach possible, and the Policia who take extra care to watch for the safety of the camp.

The medical team, comprised of doctors, nurses, and medical students, provide for the medical needs of the campers, from dispensing painkillers and bandages, to running IV fluids for a severely dehydrated person. They also send teams into the local areas, to hold mobile clinics, and provide free medical care to the local population. They, also, do not leave their posts while on duty. They stand ready for the next serious emergency, while praying that it never comes.

The ministry team leads music and teaches during chapel, morning and night. They go to each site and visit the working groups, helping out for a bit and working to keep morale high. They wash and massage feet, help set up tents, step in to help the other staff teams, and help the camp get up on the right side of the sleeping bag each morning with their interesting musical selections played over the camp speakers.

The kitchen staff, however, comprises the most vital part of the camp's staff system. They do not keep the thugs out, nor patch up the injured campers. They provide, however, the most basic, vital role among the staff groups. They feed the camp. A crew of ten to fifteen workers comprises the kitchen staff. Mathematically, each worker is responsible for feeding around one hundred campers. They are responsible for rising at four in the morning to prepare breakfast. Some get to sleep in until six, if they are merely preparing the sack lunches that each group takes out to its mission site. Then there are dishes, enough dishes to pack the average 10-foot-square bedroom four feet high. Once dishes are done, it's lunchtime, and dinner production starts at three. Most get to bed around midnight, maybe later. They are responsible for knowing the day's meals, preparing them right, serving the right portions, delivering meals to those staff members who cannot leave their posts, and cleaning the dishes to very high standards so that foodborne illness does not spread through camp. And they do all of this in a kitchen that has six propane grills, a sink that drains to a hole out back, water fed from a primitive water tower, a refrigerator, three buckets for dishwashing, and folding tables for food preparation. That's it.

Primitive doesn't begin to describe the work conditions. If this were America, the building would not even have a certificate of occupancy, let alone a license to serve food. And yet, there has not been a recorded case of foodborne illness in recent memory. But how is that, you ask?

The dish crew, that's how. The dish crew is a subset of kitchen staff, and it is their responsibility to wash the dishes. The average dinner involves the use of one hundred disposable foil roasting pans, twenty "spoodles" (tool that can act as spoon and ladle), ten very sharp butcher knives, ten oversized cutting boards, three 55-gallon kegs, two 25-gallon hot water dispensers, four 55-gallon soup pots, three or four stirring paddles roughly five feet tall, several large foodservice bins similar to the ones busboys use to clear tables, six 33-gallon cylindrical food storage containers (also known as trash cans), and 30 roasting pans that lift out of the roasters, similar to how a slow cooker works. Often, upwards of 20 plastic buckets are also used, buckets similar in size to a five-gallon paint bucket, especially to store leftovers that the staff can pick at the next day.

The dish crew is responsible for washing each and every one of these dishes, including those disposable pans. When you're working in a third-world environment, nothing is disposable. Those get re-used all week. The following year, they will become organizational bins, supportive liners for the new disposable foil pans, or whatever is needed, that can be made of foil. The punch kegs and soup pots must often be crawled into to be cleaned well. Everything must be scraped or pre-rinsed, and then washed, rinsed, and sanitized in buckets of standing water, which sit on the floor. When the water in the buckets is too dirty, it must be dumped down the drain. A hose is fitted over the faucet, to fill the bucket right on the floor. Sometimes the drain is clogged, in which case the bucket must be carried out back and dumped in the pit, or under a distant tree when the drainage pit is full. There is no dishwasher. There is no high-pressure water hose for scrubbing. Most days, the dish crew is lucky there's hot water at all, out of the small water heater that runs on some of the cooking propane. And still, the dishes must be clean, spotless even in the tiniest nook, probably more clean than the dishes sitting in your own cabinets at home. Then, they must be meticulously dried, and stacked upside-down on two shelving units, that provide precious little space for everything to be stored on. Why upside-down? Because the doors don't really close right, and it doesn't keep mice or dust out. Storing dishes upside-down does keep those health threats out of the dishes.

The dish crew is also responsible for the maintenance of drying towels and protective aprons. There are precious few towels to use, so each must be carefully hung to dry, re-used until dirty, then washed and dried. Each towel must be accounted for daily, or they begin to go missing. Each apron must be accounted for, as well, or it also may go strangely missing. Each utensil must be accounted for, and sorted properly so that the cooking crew can find what they need, when they need it. Sometimes when an urgent situation comes up, finding the right tool right away can be the difference between a good dinner, and a 30-serving pan of rice burned and ruined.

The dish crew loans a person out each meal to deliver meals to the medical and security teams on duty. This person is responsible for making not one but two laps around camp, first taking orders and checking for food allergies, then preparing the meals and labeling any special ones before carrying nearly thirty meals on a second lap. It takes nearly two hours, and a very good memory of special orders, to provide foodservice to the other staff members.

And, the dish crew has the special responsibility of overseeing KP. For breakfast and dinner, groups of student volunteers come in to be responsible for serving the food and assisting with dishes, so that the kitchen can run on a bare-bones crew the rest of the day. The dish crew is responsible for making sure the KP team knows what they're doing in serving the food, and ensures that the few dishes they help with before chapel time, come out clean and safe for the next meal. If the dish crew makes one error in cleanup, it can easily and quickly sicken several hundred campers, which can effectively bring to a halt not only the student groups' work, but the charity work of the medical team, who must then care for the ill campers.

They must do all of this, again, in a kitchen with precious few supplies, only electricity enough to power a few lights, water that only runs at the water pressure afforded by a water tower 8 feet high, and some oversized wash buckets. They must contend with mice running across their feet, flies and dust blowing in, 130-degree heat when the grills are running, 130-degree heat and thick smoke on pancake morning, 40 degrees (if they're lucky) on cold cereal morning, and far too little sleep. Some of them do it with arthritic knees, asthma flare-ups, bodies bruised and battered from boisterous games during the noon to three o'clock break.

And yet, it gets done, and done so well, foodborne illness does not happen. How? The crew has an unwavering dedication to serving the needs of others, and an overwhelming desire to stand in the background and do the hot, dirty support work that nobody else wants to do. They are, in their own way, an elite force of dedicated individuals, who know their job and have a deep understanding of the vital importance of it.

That, and they are not altogether sane.