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