City of Odessa

posted Wednesday, May 23, at 8:45 am
Yesterday, Tuesday, we got a tour of many parts of the city. Pastor Alexander drove us to meet Michelle who works at Internot #4 (orphanage #4). She is from Omaha and teaches craft and dance classes in the orphanage. Our church helps support her work. We had hoped to meet some of the children that are pen pals with some of the Mitchell Christian School kids. Unfortunately there is a government inspection and visitors can not come in this week. We went to lunch with Michelle and saw her apartment.

from left: Morgan, Michelle, Pastor Alexander, Amber, Jon

After that Pastor Alexander took us on a tour of more of the city. To summarize, Odessa is like many cities trying to restore the beauty of the old buildings. It has great potential though because of the beautiful old buildings and history here. They just finished another beautiful park with many benches that was quite busy on a Tuesday afternoon. Off from there was a street with many upscale shops that was closed to traffic and was paved with cobblestone.

Opera House in Odessa (under restoration)

The new apartments and the old apartments. We saw many old apartments that were built in the 1980's under Soviet control. Apartments then were assigned to people. Here is a picture of the balconies. They build onto their balconies in a variety of ways to meet their needs. Many have windows to create a sunroom. This is where their laundry hangs from.

Chess and dominoes in the city park.

We went to Arcadia Beach area. That was a nice beach, full of people, with many shops and more in progress.


We then went to Pastor Alexander's for supper and visited with their family for the evening. Their son and his wife did most of the translating and we learned about their family.