Life in Mansa

So here we are in Mansa, Zambia...but how did we get here? Well, me (John) and Ruth were picked up by her contact Martin Chiona (as well as our multitudes of luggage) and he drove us 9 hours north to Mansa. Now let me tell you that driving here does not mean the same thing as driving in the states. First we head off on a reasonbly good paved road. We stop in some little town to pick up food and the like...so far no big difference. But the farther away from Lusaka you get the larger and more frequent the potholes in the road are. Pretty soon you find that we are swerving back and forth trying to avoid the potholes here and there. But what I mean when I say potholes are LARGE (3 feet wide by 1 foot deep) holes in the pavement where road used to be. That being said it was still nice to have a paved road all the way to Mansa. Me and Ruth enjoyed getting out into the country side (mostly mixed grassland and woodland) and saw it as a welcome respite from the car exhaust and city streets of Lusaka. We got up to Mansa at about 9:30 PM and checked into our hotel (though it was pretty challenging to find a recptionist as she was about to leave work for the night. We settled into our room, took (HOT!!! ...nice) showers, and went to bed. We got up the next day and scoped out our accomodation at the research station. It is a fixer-upper to say the least so we have been spending most of our time managing the construction site and we will hopefully move in on Monday. We have met many nice people while staying in Mansa but we are looking forward to moving out of our hotel room (right now we are cooking meals on a hot plate on the desk in our room and to wash dishes we have to take showers with the pots). We are starting to settle into a pace of life here...waking up and eating breakfast...heading to work....going home and cooking supper/reading. Watching the predictable afternoon and evening storms roll across the African plain and be serenaded to sleep each night by raindrops and rumbles (it rains every night here in the rainy season...which we are in). There is so much I have left out of this post but we'll just have to have Ruth fill you in on the rest when she gets a chance to make a post. Hopefully the next time we post we will be talking about moving into our house here at the reserach station. Hope this post finds all of you well...JAR.