Driving to Odessa tomorrow , evidently 7 hours drive from here and it has been a bit of a whirl in this city of 350k people . Many of our students are in this area and we seem to have many friends and we have met a few new ones this time .
Goordie Siebring our original farm partner back in 2001 has a couple of good guys living and working here . Max and Bogdan are restoring used machinery from the States and they both have their own businesses and are doing very well
We also made a side trip to see Maria who was our translater from Odessa who went with us to the Dnieper irrigation area on one of our trips and we got to know her so well she adopded us as her parents and we helped her in her studies in Prague. In prague she met Pascal from Lebanon and they invited us to their wedding 2011 I think .
She is in Ukraine to visit her relatives with her two small children so we drove about 3 hours across awful roads to visit with her.
As an aside her relatives are setting up a new Permaculture farm in their village and this was a real eye opener . I had read about this permaculture but never saw it in action and I guess this is a perfect climate for it.
We also have seen some of our students we support from the big Baptist Churh here
Ivan and Paul are mature young guys doing their third year theology at the bible school here both are skilled tradesmen that can make a real contribution to the culture of this country.
We also saw Nicolys orphan kids 28 of them in his privately run facility that we have seen over many years and now he is restoring an old Shire hall in a village near here as an orphanage and an old folks home as his lease on his current building is running out . This is a huge project.
McEwen Farming and Family Stuff 
Leave a comment