The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Michigan in Color
Wednesday, November 3, 2021 — 7

Content warning: This article contains mention of 
sexual assault
October clambers in without warning, its 
ostentatious display sweetened by crisp autumn air, 
boisterous jack-o-lanterns flashing toothy grins and 
ghost stories. 
I’ve never experienced the supernatural: I have 
no sinister encounters to furtively whisper around 
a bonfire, no tales of messages from beyond or Ouija 
boards gone awry. I’ve never touched the other side, 
but I think I believe in ghosts. Not the kind you’re 
thinking of, I’m sure, but ghosts all the same.
The ghosts I’m acquainted with don’t look like the 
ones written in folklore. They are not disembodied 
figures with lifeless skin, pinned up curls and 
shadowy nightdresses clinging to their skeletal, 
evanescent frames. They lack the eeriness of empty 
eye sockets and mouths frozen in a permanent 
scream of agony, moaning in torment as they float 
down ornate spiral staircases. Mine take the form of 
moments frozen in time, so vivid I think they’re still 
here, but long-since dead. 
They are people, places, memories, relentless in 
their haunting and antagonizing in their absence. 
They lurk patiently in every corner, begging to 
be remembered: in old photo albums and my 
childhood bedroom, in text messages and vacant 
corner stores, in the pages of my high school diary 
and the dusty frames on my nightstand. Ghosts 
may connote death, but it’s the living who create 
them. We conjure them in empty corridors and 
horror films. We lure them to speak to us in the 
sanctity of flickering candlesticks, with our hushed 
whispers and electronic spirit boxes. We want them 
to make themselves known to us, enamored by the 
untouchable specters we force back into existence.
I am no stranger to necromancy, to the cruel and 
fruitless pursuit of trying to bring things back from 
the dead. I long for lemures: I crack the door open 
for them, I leave the lights on. I am encompassed by 
eulogies, akin to apparitions. 
I am a mosaic of ghost stories. To tell them is to keep 
them alive.
T
he Graveyard
I drive back to the town I’m from and think 
I’ve never seen a graveyard look so much like home. 
The roads are familiar but uncanny, reeking with 
the putridness of a past life. I was born and raised 
here: I’ve kissed every corner, caressed every crack 
in the concrete, so why do I feel like a tourist? I don’t 
recognize the new shop by my high school. The city 
has cut down the towering oak tree in front of my 

house and nobody cared to invite me to the wake. 
I am sick with unrest, like an anguished Victorian 
spirit discovering that the sanctuary wherein he 
lived and loved had been bulldozed and replaced, 
that nobody remembered him at all. I drive the same 
car but it feels like a casket now, a cold metal vessel 
transporting me through a world that’s since moved 
on without me. I’m pale with the bone-chilling 
premonition that things have died here. 
I realize I’ve died here too, a hundred times over. 
So many little versions of me have faded away, leaving 
sepia-toned remnants in their wake. Old flames, 
friends, feelings and fleeting memories, all faceless 
ghosts now marking this place as a land of no return. 
I wonder if my presence sends a chill down the locals’ 
spines, if they know someone that no longer belongs 
here has tried to communicate from the other side. 
I try to rouse these things back to life. I perform 
seances in the parking structure I used to frequent 
with people who dare not speak of my existence. 
I watch in solitude as the sunset, red as inferno, 
sets the town ablaze. I think about how so much 

has changed here, that I’ve changed too. But I find 
solace in knowing that one November evening, we 
drove up to the top of the parking structure and 
used our car keys to carve our names into the wall. 
I’m grateful for the etchings that outlived us, the 
irrevocable proof that once, I was here.
Kyra tells me to hold my breath when we drive past 
a cemetery. Superstition warns that the restless spirits 
will enter your soul and nestle into your bones. With 
no home to return to, they anxiously await a gust of air 
from unassuming lungs that they can get swept up in, 
longing to take the life that courses through your veins 
and make it their own. I don’t blame them, but we 
selfishly puff up our cheeks and sit in silence anyways. 
Kyra steps on the gas so we don’t suffocate. We turn 

the corner and breathe out a sigh of relief in unison. 
I pull out of the driveway of my home and make the 
trip back to school. I hold my breath. I’m blue in the 
face the entire way there. 
P
retty Dead Things
My body feels like a graveyard, too. 
Because my body, it’s a mess of limbs and 
appendages, of flesh and regret. Sometimes it feels 
like a thing I haunt, a land that is no longer mine. To 
be so disjointed in the skin that was painstakingly 
designed for you feels blasphemous, but each 
movement is exorcised out of me, like I’m rattling 
my putrefying bones from the inside trying to coax 
out some evil sickness. 
I remember the graverobbers that visited my 
body, their greedy hands digging and clutching 
and taking, always taking. They were insatiable 
in their taking, and their hunger raised a mind-
splitting ring in their ears that stopped them from 
hearing me protest and plead and persist that this 
body is mine, not theirs. Not that it matters: dead 
girls can’t say no. 

It feels like watching from the other side, 
suspended in the leaden grey of compulsory silence. 
Like a spirit that doesn’t know it’s passed on, 
screaming until her throat is raw, wondering why 
nobody can hear her. But I watched as they made a 
grave of me, something so alive, with teeth and hair 
and blood and fight left in me, still. 
I mourn the girl that I was before you touched 
me. I bring her flowers on Sundays. I make her 
headstone beautiful, wondering if dead things can 
be pretty, too. 
I scrub and shine until my knuckles bleed. 
Can dead things be pretty, too? 

The Ford School of Public Policy 
and School of Public Health hosted 
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, 
Director-General of the World 
Health Organization, to reflect 
on the lessons learned during the 
COVID-19 pandemic and discuss 
preventative steps to make sure the 
same mistakes are not repeated. The 
event began with an introduction 
of Ghebreyesus from Public Policy 
Dean Michael Barr. 
Ghebreyesus 
began 
his 
presentation by stating, “I have often 
said that health is a political choice.” 
He 
reminded 
viewers 
that 
regulations 
involving 
pandemic 
response such as, isolation and 
quarantine guidelines were already 
put in place before the pandemic 
started. In addition, he recognized 
that low-income countries and 
minority groups have suffered from 
the pandemic at disproportionately 
higher rates in comparison to affluent 
countries and citizens. He attributed 
the failure of handling the pandemic 
to medical systems only focusing on 
whether they were advanced through 
research and practice, not whether 
the systems were stable enough to 
handle catastrophe. According to 
Ghebreyesus, this factor is what 
contributed to many advanced 
medical systems, like the United 
States, feeling overwhelmed when 
the virus was rapidly spreading. In 
light of these issues, Ghebreyesus laid 
out three lessons the pandemic has 
taught health care policymakers and 
how countries can move forward:
 1. A strong healthcare system 

is not the same as an advanced 
healthcare system. 
The underinvestment in public 
health and primary healthcare 
is one of the main factors why 
healthcare systems were swamped 
when 
the 
pandemic 
started. 
Ghebreyesus said that “primary 
health is good for providing mental 
health and mitigating the effects of 
social, economic and environmental 
health.” Investing in primary care 
has shown lower rates of emergency 
department visits, lower mortality 
rates and higher rates of patient 
satisfaction. In addition, investing 
in primary care allows health 
problems to be discovered early, so 
patients can avoid drastic outcomes 
later down the line. 
2. Increased funding for resources 
to help countries recover and be 
prepared for another pandemic.
Money needs to be put towards 
helping low and middle-income 
countries get out of the pandemic. 
According to Ghebreyesus, the money 
should be allocated for surveillance, 
laboratory, communication, contact 
tracing and preparedness using the 
one health approach. The one health 
approach analyzes how people’s 
health is related to their environment. 
For example, the one health approach 
would study how climate change 
impacts access to water and food 
within a community. Using the one 
health approach to understanding 
health allows health care officials 
to see how environments influence 
one’s health and allows citizens to see 
how what they consume or how they 
live is either benefitting their health 
or causing harm. 

I never knew that, for a period 
of my childhood, food stamps kept 
me fed. It wasn’t until I took an 
Intro to Public Policy course during 
my second-year fall that I learned 
about food stamps, their “benefits” 
and who they help. I knew my 
parents struggled financially after 
they separated, but they made sure 
their kids never worried about 
money. The class had a module on 
social welfare policy which taught 
us about different government 
programs aimed at assisting the 
poor, unemployed and marginalized 
in society. We discussed different 
programs such as the Supplemental 
Nutrition 
Assistance 
Program 
(SNAP, 
aka 
food 
stamps), 
Temporary Assistance for Needy 
Families (TANF, a cash welfare 
system for the very poor), minimum 
wage and others. Throughout the 
module, however, I noticed that 
programs providing benefits to 
the most vulnerable populations 
were 
commonly 
political 
and 
rarely seemed to pursue their noted 
mission of lifting people out of 
poverty. 
Though the module offered 
dozens of graphs, charts and 
statistics with insightful numbers, 
data can do little to show the 
individual 
impact 
of 
policy. 
Throughout my public policy classes, 
I always have long and complicated 
academic papers assigned which 
describe how to help poor people, 
even though most of the time these 
articles are written by old, wealthy 
and institutionally educated white 
academics. To better understand 
how social welfare helps (or hurts) 
a community, legislators should look 
to their constituents who participate 
in such programs. 
After reading the papers, graphs 
and data, I wanted to learn from 
the perspective of the true working 
class, so I could better grasp what 
eligible participants thought about 
the efficacy of social welfare policies. 
After first learning about SNAP in the 
introductory course, I called my mom 
and asked her if she knew what SNAP 

was and if she used SNAP benefits to 
feed my two siblings and myself. Her 
response: “YUP, we were broke,” in a 
comical manner. 
Since that initial call last fall, I 
was trying to remember more of the 
conversation surrounding SNAP 
and her experience with it. This 
semester, however, I am taking a 
social policy seminar, a course that 
dives into many different welfare 
policy areas such as tax benefits, 
aging policy, education, housing 
and universal basic income. Again 
being reminded of the worsening 
state of America’s poor through this 
class, I wanted to leave the boring 
(but informative!) white papers and 
research studies and engage with 
the working class directly. So, I 
conducted a formal interview with 
my mom to gauge her thoughts on 
the SNAP program. 
We discussed the application 
process first. From 2007 to 2010 
my mom was on SNAP benefits. 
She began to describe the rather 
long process it takes to determine 
whether one is eligible for benefits. 
First, she had to go to the Illinois 
Department of Human Services. 
SNAP is a federally funded program 
that grants states flexibility when 
determining the program’s design 
and implementation. After arriving 
at the Department of Human 
Services and filling out the paper 
application, one waits at home to 
receive an interview invitation in the 
mail. Though I knew states varied 
in SNAP eligibility, I never would 
have thought an interview would be 
a necessary component when trying 
to feed your family. 
This interview process is a perfect 
example 
of 
an 
administrative 
burden that plagues social policy. 
Administrative burdens refer to 
different costs associated with 
joining an assistance program. 
Learning about how to apply for a 
program, filling out complicated 
documents and dealing with the 
stress and stigma that come with 
government aid are all examples of 
administrative burdens that deter 
many people from receiving benefits 
such as SNAP. 

Ghost stories

Dr. Tedros Adhanom 
Ghebreyesus presents global 
perspectives on public health

Welfare from a 
mother’s perspective

YASMINE SLIMANI
Daily Arts Writer

ANCHAL MALH
MiC Columnist

Design by Janice Lin

Design by Maggie Weibe

puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com

By August Miller
©2021 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
11/03/21

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

11/03/21

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, November 3, 2021

ACROSS
1 Site-hop, 
Webwise
5 Watched closely
9 Beetle relative
14 “Small world”
15 Fish that ought 
to go well with a 
cobbler?
16 Paddled
17 Not at all biased
18 Yeast-free loaf
20 Au courant, with 
“in”
22 Common lunch 
hour
23 Instrument for 
Este Haim of 
the pop rock trio 
Haim
24 Opposite of a 
roast
27 “When They 
See Us” creator 
DuVernay
28 Become less 
brilliant, as colors
29 Fictional legal 
secretary
35 Org. impacted by 
the Real ID Act
38 “CHiPs” actor 
Estrada
39 Kitten’s cry
40 Place in an 
overhead bin, 
say
41 Not looking good
42 Three-horned 
dinosaur
46 Self-__
48 Hoppy brew 
letters
49 Job for the 
police
56 DEA agent
57 Valley
58 Application of 
small drops
59 Overpowered ... 
or how the 
Across answers 
with circles might 
be described?
62 Bends
63 Surg. holding 
area
64 Save for later, as 
a TV show
65 Pacific salmon
66 Puts in the work 
for
67 Appear
68 Suffix with 
Jumbo

DOWN
1 What Germany 
has that Greece 
doesn’t?
2 DIY mover
3 Mighty mammal 
with keratin horns
4 Rite of passage 
involving hot 
embers
5 Law firm abbr.
6 Kits and cubs
7 “Silas Marner” 
author
8 Interior design
9 Role
10 iPod accessory
11 Showed, as a 
good time
12 Rag on
13 Puts into the mix
19 Carver’s tool
21 Soprano 
superstar
25 Rapper Lil __ X
26 Upside-down 
sleeper
29 Dawn 
phenomenon
30 Slice of history
31 Author who 
wrote the 
Thongor fantasy 
series
32 “That’s enough!”

33 Word with hall or 
room
34 Woolly mama
36 Unruly head of 
hair
37 9-Across et al.
40 Short-lived 1765 
legislation
42 Amount past due?
43 Tears to shreds
44 Rocker Ocasek
45 Goodall subjects
47 “You gotta be 
kidding!”

49 Linney of “Ozark”
50 Indisputable 
evidence
51 Skateboard leap
52 Christopher who 
played Superman
53 Boot on a 
diamond
54 Cheesy chip
55 Cicely of “Roots”
56 “Ain’t gonna 
happen”
60 Market advances
61 Bubbly title

SUDOKU

WHISPER

“Why did 
Sally fall off 
the swing?”

“She had no 
arms. Happy 
Halloween.”

WHISPER

By Craig Stowe
©2021 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/27/21

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

10/27/21

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, October 27, 2021

ACROSS
1 Like many a 
basement
5 Hold dear
10 Breakfast 
companion?
13 __ vaccine
14 As a companion
15 Soup du __
16 Big name in plant 
food
18 Reverse
19 Also
20 G.I. entertainment 
often featuring 
Bob Hope
22 Through street
26 Hollywood Walk 
of Fame symbols
27 Get duded up
28 “Despite my best 
attempts ... ”
30 Bladed tool
31 Enjoyed the buffet
32 [as per the 
original]
33 First section 
of the “Divine 
Comedy”
36 “That makes 
more sense”
40 Witticism
41 Big bang letters?
42 Keep __ distance
43 Kitchen gadget
47 Greek wraps
49 Take the floor
50 Unlike bikinis
52 Handicraft worker
54 Something up 
one’s sleeve
55 Jackson family 
musician born 
Toriano
56 Home with a 
between-floors 
entrance ... and 
what can be 
found on puzzle 
rows 3, 6, 8 and 
10?
62 Smooth (out)
63 Events with kings 
and queens
64 Shade of blue
65 “__ 
Rosenkavalier”
66 Lathered up
67 Slush Puppie 
parent company

DOWN
1 __ Pérignon
2 “Hereditary” 
director Aster

3 Deface
4 Missouri River 
feeder
5 Heroism
6 Blonde 
beverage
7 Part of a cord
8 Like a mob 
scene
9 They might clash 
on stage
10 Actress Helena 
__ Carter
11 Email program 
named after 
writer Welty
12 Half-asleep
15 Supreme Court 
figure
17 Filmmaker Ethan 
or Joel
21 Davis of “Do the 
Right Thing”
22 “East of Eden” 
brother
23 Sailing hazard
24 “Leave __ me”
25 Exist
27 Letter after 
upsilon
29 Helper: Abbr.
31 Payment before 
a deal
34 Sentiment
35 Lures (in)

36 Concerning
37 Snitch (on)
38 Chiwere speaker
39 Used to be
41 Royal flush card
43 Like many 
candies
44 Get in
45 Ramble on and 
on
46 Amateur
47 Birth 
announcement 
word

48 Sana’a native
51 One taking a 
fall
53 Egyptian 
slitherers
57 Mauna __
58 Little devil
59 Device that 
may be wet 
or dry, briefly
60 End of the 
day
61 Cleaning 
ingredient

HUGO QUINTANA
MiC Columnist

 Read more at MichiganDaily.com

 Read more at MichiganDaily.com

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