The Little Things… Dish Crew Six

No matter what you do after preparing, cooking, and eating a meal there will always be dishes to wash, and with an average of 45+ people eating at every meal, here at MCS, we create a lot of dirty dishes. To make sure that they all get washed the students are divided up into Dish Crews. I happen to be a part of dish crew six also known as the varsity dish crew. When the rotation lands on dish crew six it becomes our duty to tackle the massive piles of dishes to clean.

There are many different jobs to do and if executed well as my dish crew does on a regular basis, it can be done quickly. The first job, manned by 2-3 students, is the dirty side. It is their responsibility to load the dishes coming in onto the trays so that they can go through our dishwasher known as “The Hobart.” After the dishes have been successfully loaded onto trays they get passed to the sprayer. The sprayer has one of the most important tasks. They must spray off as much of the excess food from the dishes that they can, and if they fail to do so, the dishes will have to be scrubbed again and put back in through the Hobart. The third job on the dish crew is to work on the clean side. On the clean side you have to take the clean dishes and put them in their proper places around the kitchen. This task must be done well because if you put dishes in the wrong place the kitchen staff my find it hard to make the next meal. The last job, which is how I spend the majority of my dish crews, is to wash the pots. This part of the dishwashing process is kind of separated from the rest because it takes place at its own sinks. Through a process of scrubbing, rinsing, and sanitizing, the pots are hand-washed and then passed off to the clean side to be put away.

While all of this is occurring, to make things interesting we usually play music and dance around. When we are done with the dish washing we finish up with some more dancing and mopping the floor. I can honestly say for myself that I feel so accomplished after each dish crew when I think about how large the pile of pots was and then look around at the clean dish room. Dish crew as well as many other things we do around Chewonki has made me realize just how important the little jobs are. Whether it’s the all the little maintenance projects that keep Chewonki functioning or the parts of my dish crew it’s the little things that make this world go round.

-Nick McLeod, Wiscasset, ME