Haitian Creole Resources (updated 8/2015)

If you’re ready to go to Haiti and would like to learn the language before you go (highly recommended), here are some resources that will help.  All of these sites have free resources available.  Some are completely free and others have a subset of free tools.  We would like to make this a comprehensive list of good resources, so please let us know in the comments if you have other favorites!

Pimsleur Audio Lessons (first lesson is free)
http://www.pimsleur.com/Learn-Haitian-Creole
http://www.pimsleurmethod.com/free-pimsleur-haitian-creole-mp3-download.html

Basic Creole Lessons by New Missions (7 free lessons)
http://creole.newmissions.org

How Should Christians Vote?

What campaign issues are important?  What issues should be important?

To those who call themselves Christians, when looking at election candidates on the issues, what could possibly trump preserving the life of unborn children, preserving marriage as God laid out in Genesis 2, and preserving the right for Christians to teach and speak what the Bible says? 

Just looking at those issues should cause us to forget about or set aside the unrelenting spending and debt issues that we’re warned about in Proverbs 22, forget about the socialist agendas that are so clearly unscriptural, forget about world government and the eroding United States sovereignty. 

Help us understand what issues could be more important enough to vote for anyone supported by the Democrat party when they are so staunchly, diametrically opposed to these simple Biblical principles.

We know that minds are already made up for this election, but it helps to understand how decisions were reached.

For those interesting in learning more about the issues and where candidates stand, please see this list of voting guides.

“The 13 Heresies in The Shack” – Leading the Way with Michael Youssef

The author of The Shack, Paul Young, amazingly is still speaking at “churches” around the country, so we revived a document compiled by Leading the Way with Michael Youssef that includes book references and contrasting Biblical truth.  The full video of the talk by Michael Youssef is available here: http://vimeo.com/4479699.  The Way of the Master radio show talked about Michael Youssef’s teaching and there’s a  short audio clip of just the list of heresies with Todd Friel adding some insight and analysis along the way.  That clip is available on youtube.  Here’s another perspective of the book by Eric Barger and Take a Stand.

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“The 13 Heresies in  The Shack” – Leading the Way with Michael Youssef (www.leadingtheway.org)

Free For All: Music, Books, Merchandise, Samples & Online Storage

If  you’re a fan of getting things for free, then you may like this post.  Here are a few of my favorite sources for free things.

Music

• Hear It First sends out a newsletter every week or 2 with links to free Christian music.  They typically have free album previews and interviews with Christian artists.
• iTickets has 1 or 2 free music downloads from Christian artists every week.  New songs available on Tuesdays.  The site also has information about upcoming Christian concerts and events.
• FreeCCM has free Christian music downloads, starting with 10 free songs for the summer.
• K-LOVE has a free song listed, but it’s not clear how often it is updated.

Books & Reading

• Christian Audio sends out a newsletter with information about 1 free audio book download every month.  They sometimes run deep discounts on other audio books as well.
• Blogging For Books has a review program where you can order books for free as long as you write a review for every book you receive.
• Multnomah Books also has a free books for a written review program.
• YouVersion has a nice variety of Bible reading plans with a variety of free Bible versions available as well.
• Free Stuff Times sends out notifications (and lists them online) about free samples and promotions, including frequent notices about free Kindle and Nook books.  These are not the standard free public domain books, but short term promotions of books that typically cost a few dollars.

Online Storage

• SugarSync is the best online storage that I’ve found, especially if you have files that you’d like to share with others and they need to have the latest version, or if you or someone else edits the files from another computer and you always want to edit the latest version.  This include 5GB for free, and you can get more free space for things like referrals.  In fact, if you follow the link to this one, you’ll get an extra 500MB of space (and so will we).
• SkyDrive has 5GB of free online storage that can be automatically synced from your computer.
• MiMedia offers 7GB free but is stingy with referral space.
• Mail.com not only offers free IMAP e-mail with unlimited mail storage space, but also includes an extra 2GB of free file storage.
• Box.net also offers 5GB of free storage.  If you see any “too good to be true” offers for Box.net, it’s still wise to check out.  They’ve been running promotions where you get 50GB free when you buy certain devices.  The upload and synchronization tools were very inferior initially (completely unusable for uploading more than a few files at once), but seem to be somewhat better these days.
• Dropbox seems to be the rage for Mac users, but they only offer 2GB of free space, and they lack some features found in SugarSync.  If you’re a Mac user, you’re expected to have an account, even if you add another online storage tool as well.

Notes and Web Sites

• Evernote is a great tool for saving snippets from web sites and other notes to the web.

Free Samples

These sites all have newsletters or alerts that you can sign up for (or remember to look at the web site) to get notices about free samples and promotions that are available.  There is some overlap among them.  These are generally completely free offers, and do no require filling out long forms, surveys, or placing orders for other products.

• Hey! It’s Free!
• Free Stuff Times
• All Free Samples

Earn Free Merchandise

SwagBucks allows you to earn credits that you can use for merchandise purchases by searching the web and doing a few other things on their web site.  If you can rip yourself away from Google or StartPage for your web searches, check this out.  It’s possible to earn about $5-10 a month in Amazon gift cards just by changing your search engine.

This list is far from exhaustive, but these are some of the sites we use fairly regularly.  If you have any favorites that you’d like to share, please add them to the comments section.

Updates:

• Added K-LOVE music entry.
• Added box.net to free online storage and expanded MiMedia and Mail.com descriptions.
• Added Dropbox to online storage.