Work Duty

All YWAMers are familiar with the concept of work duties! As part of the community life of YWAM, every student who lives on the base is assigned a work duty, or chore, to complete each day. At my DTS, work duties ranged from hospitality to grounds-keeping, to the ever-glamourous toilet-cleaning. Here in Norway, I have kitchen duty! This is actually one of the most enjoyable duties. Each day, I have the responsibility of preparing for and cleaning up after one of our meals. The really nice thing about this job is that it changes from week to week. Last week, I was in charge of supper (the 8pm meal), and this week it's dinner (the 4pm meal). For those of you who are now questioning the safety of the students on our base, don't worry--kitchen duty doesn't actually involve any cooking! Breakfast and supper duties involve putting out the bread and various condiments, while dinner duty only involves putting out the food that our wonderful chef, Fred, prepares. And then, of course, there is clean-up, which the bulk of the job. Most of the dishes can be fed through the heavy-duty industrial size dishwasher, but the big pots and pans have to be washed by hand. Then there are the counters to wipe down, the garbage to take out, and the floor to mop. This week, I'm doing dinner duty with Gunna and Per Kristian (P.K.), and we are having a blast! Most days it only takes about 45 minutes to an hour to clean up, but today there were a lot of extra dishes, so it took almost 2 hours. But working together makes the job enjoyable. Plus the fact that we can pilfer food left over from the meal. Today there was some chocolate cake that mysteriously disappeared during our work duty... hmm... we'll have to have someone look into that :-)