Living in the Haitian Haunted House

Looking back on the past few months, there have a been a few highlights.

I grew another creeper mustache.

I met the girl of my dreams only to find out she is engaged a couple hours later.

I ran across the Golden Gate Bridge.

I went to a concert by Sir Paul McCartney.

None of that can compare to what I did at the start of the summer. Not too long after the earthquake in Haiti, Dustin and I got together with a business professor and a few students to organize a project we called Sustain Haiti. It's been a very eye-opening process from the beginning. It's all be very humbling. We both absolutely loved our time in Haiti.

I was on the lead team. We went  to Leogane, the epicenter of the earthquake, where 90% of the buildings were destroyed. It was shocking. Everywhere you turn there is rubble. Some buildings survived. There were two large buildings that suffered almost no damage from the earthquake. One was the Mormon Church. The other was the largest Voodoo temple.

There were a couple dozen houses that were still standing in the area. Almost no one would dare sleep inside. I couldn't blame them. They would sleep outside in tents. Most people were living in tent cities. Constantly praying that their tent and tarps would survive the rainy season. There were many people who didn't have tents or even tarps in some cases. I saw people living under cotton sheets propped up by pieces of wood or sticks.

After the earthquake, the LDS church opened up its doors. Many people lived on the church grounds. However, after a while the Church asked the people to leave. As soon as everyone left, the Church had a brake in. The walls surrounding the church property had collapsed because of the quake. The Church leaders decided to allow some of the leaders in the Ward to come back. When we arrived, they told us that we could stay while we looked for a place to stay for the summer. I was impressed from the beginning at the generosity of the people there. They bent over backwards to make sure that we were comfortable.

Looking for housing turned out to be a lot of work. To say that Leogane was going through a housing shortage is a bit of an understatement. We looked at many of the houses that were still standing. People were asking for $3,000/month for a small house that was full of cracks. As we were traveling around we still had some big aftershocks. Some of these houses looked like they might not survive the next aftershock.

Across the street from the Church, there was a large house that looked abandoned. The razor wire around the house was covered in thick cobwebs.  We were given a tour by the nervous-looking landlord. "This house has hardly ever had people in it. It's owned by a rich guy who lives in the States who just likes having a few houses around in case he ever wants to live." The house has a very eerie feeling. It was large, there was relatively nice furniture but everything was coated thickly in dust. I tried taking pictures of the place and my camera broke.

Just about everyone in Leogane told us that the house was haunted. Some members of the ward down there said that they had seen evidence that the place was haunted. Apparently, the previous homeowners had left some dishes out for a while that had some food on it. They left it there for a while. When the came back, the ghosts had cleaned up their dishes and put them away. While that seemed frightening to the locals, I saw it as free labor. When we moved in, I tested it out but our maid/ghost must have been feeling lazy.

The ghost would also turn off the tv when people would get too rowdy watching soccer games. Some of the locals claimed to have been present when this happened. In their defense, Haiti's history has included some very violent periods. It's not hard to imagine a slave being brutally killed on any given plot of land. And Haiti is the world capital of voodoo which certainly wouldn't discourage your imagination when weird things happen.

Actually, once we started moving things in, we got some very sincere warnings from some of our friends. One guy was supposed to bring us dinner. We were sitting on the porch and saw him hesitate as he approached the gate. We encouraged him to pass through the gate. He hesitated again to enter the front door. We decided that in order to mitigate the fears of the locals, we had the local bishop come and bless the house. We haven't had any problems, nor have any of our Haitian partners since we did so.

So, the nice perk about buying a haunted house is that they are much cheaper than they otherwise would be. This meant that more of our money could go to our projects. And, now I can say that I was not intimidated by a Haitian maid ghost.

Ok also check this link out:

http://news.byu.edu/archive10-mar-aid.aspx

Living in the Oxford dorm room

Ok, so we're back in the UK action again. This time for a four-day research conference at University College, Oxford. And I won't pretend that we don't think we're pretty cool because we do. But that's fine, right? Our paper on aid and education was presented by our professor. Since that paper has been two years in the making, it was a pretty satisfying experience. Between that, hitting on interational grad students, and meeting some of my academic heroes of the foreign aid world, it's been a pretty solid week.

Anyway, it's been nice to be back in the dismal British isles again. I've probably consumed somewhere around 5,000 calories per day (and that's a conservative estimate), so I'm fat and happy and loving life.

As usual, we have plenty of great stories to share, even though it's only been a few days. Right now, we're gearing up for a 1 AM bus ride to a sketchy airport in preparation for an early flight to Dublin on an even-sketchier airline. I'm pumped. We spent the weekend before the conference in London, though, and that was pretty classic. Within a few jet-lagged hours, Zach got solicited by a prostitute while he was calling home from a London phone booth (don't worry i think he said no), I stuck my nose in a street fight between a cab driver and his passenger, and we spent the night without luggage in a "pleasant" hostel. Can't get enough London.

Also, i wish you could see these dorm rooms. I am living in some Harry Potter fanboys' dream world. We even eat in a big dining hall. I keep looking around waiting for some Hogwarts elf to jump out from behind a door or something. Watch out for Voldemort.

Anyway, great times in England again. Nice to be back. Hopefully we can make this a more frequent occurence. We'll definitely re-update after our emerald isle excursion.

hey, that man's not white!

So, after a long hiatus, I thought I'd throw some new stories up on the blog here - it may even be my last chance while still officially 'living in the cottage.' I apologize for the length ... you might want to divide the reading into more manageable sections or leave time for breaks. Story 1 is my personal favorite, I would at least recommend hitting that one up.

Some of you may know that Seth recently visited, and we had a straight up riot. The dip in Loch Ness has been adequately reported on below, so here's a couple more winner stories from the Seth Reeves England Extravaganza.

Story 1.

So we pick Seth up at the airport in London, and we ride the Piccadilly to Cockfosters tube line (yes, that's really what they call it) back to our hotel. When we get out on the street, we stop at a pedestrian crosswalk to wait for the light to change (being law-abiding citizens and all). Like we find in most developed countries, the opposite end of the crosswalk displayed a neon red man indicating to us that it was not safe to walk yet. When approaching the crosswalk, however, I idly noticed a man (who, it is important to note, was clearly not Caucasian) walking across the crosswalk even though the light was red. Though I did not feel inclined to comment on this phenomenon, Seth helpfully proclaimed, 'Hey! That man's not white!!'

After a moment of stunned silence at Seth's openly displayed bigotry on the streets of London, I realized that he was, in fact, informing the man that the walk signal was not yet white, indicating 'go,' and that the man was actually breaking the law by crossing the street. This was not a racist comment at all. However, this did not diminish the open hilarity of the situation, and we spent most of the weekend proclaiming 'Hey! That man's not white!' at the most inopportune moments possible.

Story 2

No trip to the UK would be complete without driving on the left side of the road, as I have reported before. So, through a strange series of events, Seth, Zach and I found ourselves driving around southern Wales in a moving van one Tuesday. Though Zach and I were supposed to work, our supervisors kindly let us leave for the day when they found out that Seth was in town. However, since Seth thought he was going to be alone for the day, we had rented him a tiny two-seater moving van that we got for real cheap. Finding ourselves short one seat, we proceeded to take the metal panelling off of the back window of the van, and Zach, being a champ, took the first shift sitting on cushions in the back of the mini-moving van. It was like a moving harem, minus the women.

Anyway, we take off across Wales in our van, hitting up as much as possible in one day. We saw scenes of 'outstanding natural beauty' on the Welsh coastline, bought some greasy wonderful fish 'n' chips, and performed in one of my favorite activities to date: Drive-by Castleing. Since there are so many castles to see, we opted for driving by the castles rather than stopping and going through them, allowing us a broad overview of many of the ancient structures. At this point, I was riding in the harem area of the van, so Seth and Zach would kindly yell back, 'We're at another castle! Stick your head out the door!,' and I would proceed to stick my head out of the sliding van door, hoping against hope that no sudden stops would decapitate me on the spot. What a party.

Story 3

Briefly, I want to mention my trip to Latvia and Sweden a couple weeks ago. I spent a weekend with Anton Oshepkov (if you're from the CTWM, Anton is doing great and it was awesome to see him). Latvia was a really eye-opening experience, I enjoyed spending time with my friend, seeing Eastern Europe, going to a church in Russian, and learning a few more Russian swear words (maybe I shouldn't mention those last two in the same sentence - just kidding about the swear words). Anway, I'll talk more about what I learned in post-Soviet Europe in a more serious post.

What was funny was that I decided to save like $20 on my flight back to the UK by staying the night in a Swedish Airport. This was probably the Worst Idea Ever. So I arrive in Sweden at like midnight and find myself in the most ghetto airport terminal I've ever seen. After pacing around hopelessly for a little while, I find myself three hard chairs and try to arrange my body on them to sleep for a few hours. So, with my butt hanging in the air and lights glaring in my eyes, I managed to sleep for about 47 minutes, until the security guard decided to wake everyone up at about 3:30 AM. Rise and shine. So, deciding to take advantage of the chance to see my ancestral home of Sweden, I took the bus into town at 4 am and proceeded to explore a dark, empty, creepy Swedish city in the wee hours of the morning. After two hours of aimless swedish wandering, I decided to find some Swedish food. I can always get excited about food. But, apparently nothing opens in Scandanavia until about 11 AM, so I contented myself with a donut from a Swedish gas station and bounced. It was great to have such a deep connection with the place many of my ancestors came from.

So anyway, there's some of the highlights of the past couple months. Great times. So, barring mid-Atlantic plane crashes, I'll hopefully see y'all in a couple weeks (unless you are reading this from the UK, in which case I will miss you in a couple weeks)

Scotland

So, it's been a while since we have posted anything and lot has happened since we last posted. Katie gave a good list of things that we did in Scotland. As great as the haggis and deep fried pizza was, I would have to say that swimming in Loch Ness was the highlight. Seth, Dustin and I were baited a little bit by our tour bus driver. We bought some Tartan shorts at a tourist gift shop next to the Loch and took a plunge. The Loch was very, very cold and very deep. The water is very dark and contains a lot of particles so the visibility in the water is next to nil. For all we know, Nessie may have just been a couple of feet away. As we climbed out of the Loch a boat of tourists came into the dock nearby and they were rapidly taking pictures. Yes, that’s right, thanks to me; there are now dozens more pictures of a grotesque creature emerging from Loch Ness (though this one is a bit more white than the more famous pictures--see the center of the photo below).

There were a couple other cool things we did in Scotland. It’s a really nice place. Scottish Nationalism is a great thing. There are a few things that Scots are very proud of:
1) Whiskey
2) Not being English
3) William Wallace
4) Inventing “everything”
(We made a list of things that Scots claim to invent which will be posted here soon)

All-in-all it’s a good place to visit. I could write a book about another place we visited called Rosslyn Chapel but I wouldn’t want to have to compete with Dan Brown.

failte do Alba! (welcome to Scotland!)

Dustin was using my computer and forgot to sign out of his blog. hehehe...no worries! now i can talk about our adventures this weekend in bonnie scotland! it was amazing! i'm sure they had a great time. as zach would say "we laughed, we cried; it was better than cats". We learned about most of the major wars in Scottish history, which is pretty much all of Scottish history. We explored a castle, swam with Nessie, and ate fried and haggis pizza. The weather in Scotland has been beautiful this past week and Saturday was no exception. I took literally 200 pictures of mountains, lakes, and valleys (or beinns, lochs, and gleanns as they say in Scotland) and a few of us as well. But at least I wasn't as bad as the guy who took 20 pictures of EVERYTHING. Even the tv screen on the bus telling us where we were on the map, he took a picture. Oh well, I hope he got his money's worth. After taking the country by storm, it was time to bid farewell, and our weekend came to a close. these are three fantastic young men; why they aren't married yet is a mystery. I would gladly spend any weekend with them and I hope they have a great time back in England and America. Soraidh cairdeas! (Farewell friends!)

love, Katie

Pancake Day

So, Tuesday was National Pancake Day here in the UK. To me that sounds like the ideal holiday. As soon as someone wished me a happy pancake day, I instantly started having visions of stacks of warm flapjacks with melted butter smothered in Mrs. Buttersworth or even the real stuff from Quebec. I asked if people really celebrate national pancake day and the answer was yes. It was Mardi Gras so while people are getting drunk and throwing insane parties in Rio and New Orleans, the Brits eat pancakes.
Well, once again I found out that there were some terminology differences. Here's a picture of a British flapjack. They are a sweet oatmeal-based cake.
These have nothing to do with pancakes.
With a little more asking, I found out what British pancakes look like.

They look (and taste) suspiciously like French crepes. However, the British way of eating them is traditionally to sprinkle lemon juice and sugar on them. It's not bad. Here is a classy video about pancake day.