Week 1

Greetings,

Mom and Dad I am still alive.  It has been some time now since my last post and there have been too many things that need telling about.  We have now spent three days and two nights here in Zambia and I am having a great time.  The people we are staying with are gracious and really fun to be around.  Gershom is a very good cook and has made us some nshima which is the main food of those who are native to Zambia.  It is a mixture of a very fine cornmeal that is called milli-meal and water.  Heating that up forms a surprisingly dense and sturdy food that is served with virtually everything.  It is balled up and formed into a spoon-like shape and used as a spoon to scoop up vegetables, beans, and different meats including beef liver which I recently had for the first time (not my favorite choice). 

The drink of choice for most meals is a concentrated form of orange juice that reminds me of lemonade with oranges instead of lemons.  It is called mazoe and it is mixed with water in a ¼ mazoe and ¾ water ratio.  That is one of the highlights of meals so far.  I still have not eaten a large amount of nshima mainly because I have been avoiding it slightly but I have been trying to slowly bring it into my diet by eating as much American style food as I can.  One afternoon we stopped at a mall in the area called Manda Hill and we exchanged money and bought some phone plans.  The mall was surprisingly American to me and it even had some food places such as subway.  We ended up eating at a Zambian fast food restaurant known as the Hungry Lion where I was very adventurous and had fried chicken and Pepsi.  The three guys that we are living with (Abel, Gershom, and Sam) are all doing a fast during every day from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and so lunches have been ours to figure out and bologna sandwiches work well.

One of the true Zambian experiences that I have had so far is the bus routes.  The city is a very large one and not everyone has cars so buses and other mass transportation methods are vital.  The resourceful people in Zambia have seen this as an untapped market and renovated their own personal vans to fit as many as possible mainly to bring in more money.  They add seats onto the ends of benches in 14 passenger vans and we fit 19 into one van.  For a slightly larger bus we were able to fit 31 adults and 2 babies.  The prices are very cheap as we ride for less than one dollar every time we ride.

The currency of Zambia is the Kwacha and the transfer rate is around $1 to         K 5400 so when I exchanged my $400 to Kwacha I became a millionaire for the first time.  While that was exciting I was also paranoid for most of the trip home about carrying such a large sum on me at one time.

We were able to get tours today of several different areas that we will be dealing with.  Along with Abel, Gershom, and Ngambo (a girl on staff here), we went into downtown Lusaka on the bus so we could see how to get there for different things and how to connect to a different bus route when we are in town.  Downtown was different from expected as almost every street was filled to the brim with either trash or vendors selling anything from mints to shoe polish.  From downtown we went out to the regional campus known as Ridgeway which serves as the medical campus.  We will be doing some ministry there in the future but most of our work will be at the main campus known as UNZA (University of Zambia).  From Ridgeway we walked a long way through UNZA and saw several of the residential areas as well as the library and soccer fields.

The focus among the staff members here is not on the campus ministry right now.  We will be leaving for what is being called Door of Hope.  This will be our trip to the villages outside of Lusaka.  We have training tomorrow and the rest of the week before we leave on Tuesday.  Currently we do not know which village we are going to but the 7 of us on the summer team will be split up between the three total villages that we will be going to.  We will then leave the village either Sunday after the church service in the village or the next day.

I know there are things that you are unsure about and I admit that I have not been able to document and blog about everything that has happened so far but we do have a limited access to internet that you pay for the amount that you use.  Uploading a blog and Skype would take up too much of our memory so the posts will not be as frequent as any of us hoped for so I will make an attempt to be thorough with my fewer posts.

I want to thank all of you for praying for us especially during our time next week when we will be in the village.  I might be able to have one more post before we leave but that is uncertain.  I would like to have you pray specifically for help with sleep as last night was not as restful as I feel that I need.  I also ask that you pray for the ministry that we will be working to further and expand.  You guys are great!

If any of you have questions ask me on here and I will try to answer them when I can.

Farewell,

Aaron Spesard