If you've been paying any attention to the news at all this week you will have seen that an earthquake of staggering magnitude pulverised a large part of Haiti.  The news coverage is shocking, the devastation immense.  Unfortunately, such tragic news stories are all too common place in our world.  From famine to war we are used to pictures of suffering entering our homes via the box in our living room.

I think we can all be forgiven if on occasion we feel slightly immune to what is happening.  Its too far away, its too great a tragedy to comprehend, it doesn't touch us personally.

I confess when I first saw the pictures, I was utterly guilty of skipping past them with a quick "Poor Haiti, hurricanes last year, earthquakes this year, they can't catch a break".  I'm certain I wasn't the only one. 

It probably would have remained just that for me, another tragedy somewhere in the world, but then my phone rang on Tuesday night.

By the cruelest of cruel twists of fate a friend from the past, who should have left the island the day before, was found in the wreckage of his building on Tuesday morning.  Nearly half way around the world his wife will be explaining to their baby that his father isn't coming home this week and in fact won't be coming home again.

Yesterday, after our little group of friends connected themselves again by phone, by e-mail, by thought across the globe, I pulled down my photo album.  There in the pages they were, my friends smiling up at the camera from a huge group hug around a dinner table.  Blissfully in love, several months from marriage, years from their baby being born and the tragedy lurking in the distance.  They were the fairy tale love story.  I know this, because I helped introduce them.  I was there when they bounced starry eyed from their first date absolutely convinced in love at first sight because it had now happened to them. 

As with many expat friendships, time and distance stretched between us with only sporadic news coming from mutual friends.  Nevertheless I am devastated for them.  That life could be so unutterably cruel.  I am shocked to my core that now two people are gone from my photo album, less than eight years after it was compiled and way, way before their time.

If you have any spare change this month, please consider donating it to one of the relief appeals for Haiti.  I will be doing so for a little boy whose memories of his father will now only be the memories of other people, in the hope that another family may be saved from such heartache.

In the Netherlands you can donate through Giro555.

Via We Heart It

Sharon of the Expats Moving and Relocation Guide sent me a link to a giveaway she is hosting at the moment for a copy of Danielle Barkhouse's book - The Expat Arc: An Expat's Journey Over Culture Shock.

To win a copy of the book click here, and submit your expat story. 

I've been quite lucky and only really experienced culture shock in one of the countries I've lived in.  However, I know it can effect people quite deeply and isn't widely talked about which can make identifying it even harder.

Isabella over at Touch of Dutch has covered culture shock in great depth and if you want to know more about it and how she coped with it I would strongly recommend reading through her archives, in particular this post, which serves as a good diagnostic guide.

Do you tweet?

I didn't really get the concept (and I'm sure I still don't) nevertheless, I entered the world of twitter some time ago and I am plodding on through.

I initially followed contacts from blogs I liked but increasingly I am branching (heh!) out and I have started to follow a couple of twitter feeds in Dutch. My Dutch is not good by anyone's standards but I am most confident reading so 140 characters is perfect for me. Often I will follow the links and start reading full articles in Dutch which is even better.

I'm not sure if helping people learn another language was one of the goals twitter set themselves when they set out to conquer the social media field but its certainly helping me.

If you want to follow me on twitter, there is a link in the right hand column which will take you to my feed.

If you are already on twitter, leave me a comment and let me know.

Do you tweet? If so what is the biggest advantage of twitter for you?

Note: As I was writing this Maryam of My Marrakesh tweeted a link to 20 Interesting Expats to Follow on Twitter. What do you think? Are there others you would add?

* to twitter, tweet or peep in Dutch.

I first lived abroad in 1996. I had taken a course at university because it required me to spend a year in Italy and at 18 that sounded like a wonderful thing to do. I hated it at first, I was lonely and isolated. That lasted about 3 months. Then I got brave. Then I got braver. By the time I had to leave, they practically had to crowbar me into the plane, I was so desperate not to go.

I lasted less than a year back in the UK. I couldn't bare the anonymity of London any more. I craved my life back in Italy, the lifestyle, the pace and the quality of life.

Two weeks after my final exams I was on a plane to Ireland to bond with my paternal family. Initially I thought I would just see how it went. I didn't go back to the UK for seven months, and only then to attend my graduation ceremony. Ireland is a pulse of the heart to me, as natural as breathing. I ache for it when I hear bad news. I celebrate its triumphs. My father is there and I try to get home as often as I can, which is never often enough. The smell of smoke from chimneys, peat fires, clean air, rain which leaves you damp to the bones even when its not raining. I thought I would never leave.

Two years later my company transferred me to Paris. I was ready for a change, my landlady in Ireland was getting married and I needed to find somewhere else to live. It seemed like a sign. I moved my belongings by FedEx, my father was horrified. "At your age I had you and yet you can FedEx your life just like that".

I knew no one in Paris. No one at all. I worked from home and for the first three months I firmly believed that I would never again hear English spoken other than on the phone. Too apprehensive of the metro system I walked everywhere that summer. Miles and miles in dusty sandals. I was astounded by how Paris squeezes your heart with its beauty, over and over again then casts you aside, gasping, at the arrogance of its natives.

In desperation I stumbled into an expat drinks night. Friday night drinks after work flowed seamlessly into midnight restaurant runs. Mouths stained with red wine, open and laughing. Talking and talking with people who knew and understood that hunger in the corner of your stomach which causes you to go out into the world, leaving your home country, looking for new experiences. Drinking buddies became dinner companions became family and remain so to this day.

It took me far too long to realise that Paris and I needed to part ways. I never stopped loving the city but I couldn't achieve what I wanted to achieve there and it was crippling me in tiny imperceptible increments.

I went to the only place I knew I could, to piece myself back together again. I went back to the UK. For a short while I revelled in speaking my own tongue all the time. It took me a while to realise that I was an alien in my own country. I had missed huge chunks of other people's experiences while I had been away. Things people expected me to be familiar with were incomprehensible to me. I learnt to stop talking about living abroad to avoid the inevitable "What? You lived abroad? Well, that's brave. Won't catch me leaving England. Why would you want to live abroad?" Nevertheless, I started to achieve and move on. I met the love of my life and somehow five years later I was still there.

I wept when he said he had been offered a job in Amsterdam. I had just started my dream job a month before, there was no way I could follow him and there was no way I could hold him back. So we began a strange hybrid existence. Straddling two coutries, racking up air miles and never really living in either country. We were homeless and it was too hard.

We talked it out and decided to make our home here in the Netherlands.

That was March 2007, we found a bigger apartment, shipped our belongings and transported the cat. He proposed in November 2007 and we married on a canal boat in August 2008. As much as I have loved everywhere I have lived, Amsterdam is home. The canals, the people, the way of life all of it feels completely natural. I love being an expat. I love the experiences it affords me and the people who cross my way on their own journeys. May it never end.