Haiti Day One: Airports and Bad Investments

So I'm on my way to Port-Au-Prince!!

Just touched down in Miami and have a few hours to kill

waiting for my flight out of this country.

Enter the bad investment

I actually just paid $5 for a half hour of internet access.

The shame is overwhelming.

If I paid that much for a straight month, it would cost almost $7500.

Side Note: I'm slow at this and totally failed to get this finished in a half hour.

I am now writing from the camp.

I'm so excited about this new journey in my life, I have spent a little bit of time reading up and getting myself prepared for what I will face when I get down there. The problem is that I have no grid to really prepare for the type of destruction that I'm going to see.

I will be helping facilitate a camp that houses 55K people on what used to be a 9 hole golf course. I don't really know how that is even possible.

I think that one of the most exciting elements of this is the unknown. People have asked what I will be doing and the answer that I give is that I've been told I will be an Information Officer but that I have no idea what that means in the way of day to day responsibilities. I don't know who I will be sharing a tent with. I don't know what I will eat. I don't know creole. I don't know what the hours will be like.

And I'm really excited about all of that.

Some kind of extreme blank slate experience.

I hope to keep this updated while I'm down there and provide clarification, but we will see as I am presently unsure about the hour situation....

New Absurd Project

Ok, so my last project ended up being a gigantic mistake.

Why I thought that I would take

time to write a whole book

whilst in the midst of application

review season and Christmas,

I am unsure.

So now I'm past it and I'm on to

some new silliness.

The goal is to translate a book that is written in a language that

I have never learnt.

I recently bought a copy of Les Miserables in Frnech and will soon start the process of translating it. I am expecting a solid amount of frustration and some really funny mistakes along the way but hopefully I come away with some ability in French and having read one of the great novels of the 19th century.

After finishing War

and

Peace,

I feel Invincible.

John Adams and John Quincy worked on their French while they were crossing

the Atlantic by reading Moliere, and John still sucked at it when he got there.

It will be interesting to see

if I can be any more successful than

this man who clearly towers over me intellectually

simply because I have access to the internet and the ability to

instantly ascertain the information I need both in written and sonic form.

Woot.

Prince Andrey's Sky

I'm reading War and Peace and what started as some truly obnoxious exhibition in erudition (for a definition of the previously used term, one need look no further than the sentence in which it is included) has become a really exciting read.

There's a reason

that

this book is famous

One of the main characters continues to have these epiphanies after doing nothing more than looking at the sky. I'm not done yet and I have to imagine that Tolstoy is going to keep coming back to this idea but he has only done it twice so far.

I guess for me, the individual revelations that the

character experiences aren't that important but I'm really interested in the way that the sky can change someone.

This infinite umbrella that never leaves us can go from the most inconsequential, and unimportant piece of our lives and then, the minute we remember it, it somehow becomes the most profound thing we have ever encountered.

Whether is it hiding behind the roof of a market in Jerusalem.

Or it's riding along with us to where ever it is that we are going. This same sky forces us outside of ourselves and demands that we consider things beyond our own concerns. It's a trite consideration but that same infinite sky sustains us and shrinks us.

Gives us life.

and more importantly,

Perspective.

Plus, it's February in Michigan. Most of us have forgotten that the sky even exists at this point so I figured some pictures would be pretty helpful.