My Journey as Kitchen Personnel During Cebu Provincial Sports Meet and Cultural Festival 2024 ( Part 1)

Cebu Provincial Sports Meet and Cultural Festival is a yearly activity that serves as an avenue for students who have skills in any kind of sports, dancing, singing, and even beauty and brains. This activity was participated by the 41 municipalities within the Division of Cebu Province. Even if it costs too much, with the cooperation from both internal and external stakeholders each municipality can send their delegation.

When the pandemic struck in our country this event was temporarily suspended. It was only this year that the activity was continued and pursued. For this year the activity was done last March 2-8,2024 and hosted by the city of Naga in cooperation with the neighboring municipality as the billeting quarters. For every Provincial meet, I'm assigned to the food committee for all the coaches and athletes. At first, I wanted to decline my role but since I was afraid that our lead principal would get angry with me I accepted the task and just did it out of love. I just prayed that God would give me strength and wisdom to perform my task well.

My dear Hive friends in this content I will share with you our journey as food committee or kitchen personnel and how I managed and performed the task well with the help and cooperation of all members of the food committee starting from our kick-off until we went home.

Before our departure, we conducted a meeting together with the other members of the committee. We discussed the different preparations we had to undergo as well as various kitchen tools, and equipment needed to make our task easy and convenient during our 1-week stay.

By Saturday at 9:00 am, the whole delegation together with the athletes, officiating officials, coaches, chaperons, school heads, and kitchen personnel or food committee departed from our municipality going to San Fernando where our billeting quarters are located. The whole delegation where coming from both elementary and secondary. The delegation rented 5 Ceres buses, 2 coaster buses,1 L3, and a dump truck for our kitchen tools and equipment.

There were two routes in going to San Fernando. The first route is via Cebu City to South Road Property and the other route is via Logo to Balamban Toledo and Aloguinsan to Carcar City Road. We chose to follow the Cebu City To South Road Property Road since it's nearer compared to the other route only if we're not affected by heavy traffic. It took almost 4 hours of our travel before we arrived at San Fernando and Catalina National High School in particular. We had our lunch while traveling that's why we arrived early compared to other buses who departed earlier. We were not familiar with the location of our billeting quarters, so I just used my Google to track the direction of our travel until we arrived at the exact location of the school where we would stay for the whole duration of the event. We're a little bit exhausted from our travel since the weather is very hot and because of the traffic too, yet we're so thankful that we arrived safely at our billeting quarters.

Upon our arrival, we arranged our kitchen tools and equipment right away. Each of us did our share. Some students pitched water while others washed the dishes and some teachers were arranging the table. Together with my co-chair, we prepared a market list for our dinner on that day and for our breakfast on the next day.

Before leaving the kitchen, I instructed the rice in charge to cook almost 15 kilos of rice since we would be preparing almost 180 heads for every meal. After that, we left the kitchen and went to the market to purchase the needed ingredients for our dinner and breakfast. Our first menu was fried fish and mongo with bones of pork. We utilized first the bones of pork that we slaughtered since it's good for mongo soup. After marketing, we cooked right away our planned menu so that our athletes and coaches could eat their dinner by 6:00 pm. After eating we prepared our main dish for packed lunch on the second day which was pork steak or pork afritada. We marinated it first so that the seasonings were absorb by the meat and ready for cooking by 2:00 am.Together with our breakfast menu ,we will cook our packed lunch simultaneously.

That's the first day of my journey as assigned as food committee or kitchen personnel in our delegation. Even if it's weekend but it's a call duty so we performed our task well and do it out of love to our learners. Thank you for reading and see you on my day 2.