Who do I live with?

There are three BYU professors that live here with their wives-Brother Huntington, Draper, and Ludlow. I have Brother Huntington as my cultural teacher and Brother Draper as my Old and New Testament teacher, and both of them will be my tour guides on our buses or "mobile classrooms" as Brother Draper likes to call them. All of them are really neat and very intelligent scholars. I am really excited for all of my classes , but they are going to work us mega hard. I think that it will be good though, because the more I study and learn in the classroom, the more I will understand and the more meaningful the sites we visit will be. There are also a few other service couples that live here with us as well who serve as the doctor, nurse, housing people, tour guides, and organist. They are all really nice and it is way fun to have them here.

The staff is made up of around 25 Jewish, Muslim, and Christian natives of the Holy Land that work as cooks, cleaners, security, and administration. The director of the Center is a Jewish man and the assistant director is a Muslim man-they are both extremely helpful and funny. All of the staff are really nice, and they are not allowed to discuss politics at work to helps prevent any diversity problems. They don't live here, but a lot of them are here working a lot. While I am mentioning the security people, I figured I would let you know about our security. We all have cell phones and can call the center if we ever get lost of left behind or have any problems. We also have cards that we use to scan in and out of the center so security knows where we are in case there was ever a problem. We have a midnight curfew.

I am here with a total of 80 students-60 girls and 20 guys. The girl to guy ratio kinda stinks for obvious reasons, but actually the main reason is because whenever we leave the center after dark we have to have a male with us, so at night they are in high demand. We have a lot of fun together though and got to be fast friends after our long trip to get over here. We have a bunch of people from Utah and Idaho, and then people from lots of different states and suprisingly there are three or four people from New Jersey.

It is fun to live in the same building as everyone and to go to school in the same building as well. It is easy to find groups of people that are doing fun things, and another thing I appreciate is seeing everyone studying. We are all taking the same classes and have the same workload, so when I see other people studying, it helps me realize I need to study. I am pretty good at putting off studying until the last minute, but it is definitely easier to study when I see everyone else doing it and I can do it with friends. We have toured around the city together and have played volleyball in our gym lately which has been a lot of fun.

It is kind of funny, but two of my roommates are from Idaho and the other one goes to BYU-Idaho, so I am the only one without an Idaho connection. They are all way fun though and we have already had some really good laughs. This picture is moi, Kendra, Carlee, and Amy.