A typical day in the life of John and Ruth

John and I are finding ourselves getting use to a routine here in Zambia. We are getting use the currency which has the lowest bill as 50 and highest as 50,000 (the conversion between US dollars is roughly $5,000K for $1US). The money here is very colorful and was hard for me to distinguish between at first, but now I am getting the hang of it.

A "typical day" for us involves getting up around 6:30 or 7:00am and starting breakfast cooking. We often eat eggs and potatoes for breakfast sometimes bread and jelly or lefts-overs like rice, beans, ground nuts or nshima with some sugar (I also like to put peanut butter in it, but John thinks that is odd and I think most Zambians would agree). We go to the office at 8:00am and greet people and ask what is the "program" for the day. Then we talk about what we would like to do that day. For me this usually involves going out to the field to scout and collect weeds or observe what is going on: weeding, planting etc. For John this ranges from working in the lab (pictured above) or going out to collect water samples.

The picture below is of a fish pond in Mansa, the farmer is very motivated and keeps excellent fish ponds, John was interested in seeing what the nutrient levels of the pond were so we collected samples from inside the pond and outside the pond in the nearby dambo (wetland) area. This farmer, besides having a 7 fish ponds (his goal is to build 10), has ducks, turkeys, kittens, dogs, chickens, pigs, and goats. He also grows maize, vegetable garden, pineapples, bananas, and palm oil. He owns his own vehicle but insists that he is "a poor man". Our friend and driver, Ben, insisted later that this man is not poor. While his living might be modest in the USA he is wealthy compared to many Zambians.

After working in the field we will come back to our home to take lunch (normally from 1-2). Then we will go back to the field or the office to do work and finish around 5:00. After work we like to get dinner going and then go for a run in the evenings. We spend our evenings preparing meals, replenishing our water supply, taking showers and we relax by reading, watching movies on our lap tops, playing cards, playing the harmonica, or talking. We hope to get some sport equipment when we are in Lusaka to have some community games that we can play with people after work, there seems to be great interest in Volley ball and of course soccer.

We recently bought bikes and road them into town. They kept breaking down on us... but thankfully there are many bike repair men in town. We actually had quite an adventure on Valentine's day, finding ourselves biking home in the pitch dark! This is not advisable, because it is so hard to see the road or people or anything but the stars were so beautiful! Thankfully we made it back to our home safe and sound.

We plan to be out of our "routine" for a bit as we are heading down to Lusaka to get our study permits and meet with some people. We love you all so much!