Christmas of misery for many in calamity-hit Haiti
Maritza Monfort is singing along to a Christmas carol in Creole on the radio, but the Haitian mother of two is struggling to lift her spirits. “I sing to ease my pain. If I think too much, I’ll die,” said Monfort, 38, one of over a million Haitians made homeless by a January earthquake that plunged the poor, French-speaking Caribbean nation into the most calamitous year of its history.
With a raging cholera epidemic and election turmoil heaping more death and hardship on top of the quake devastation, Haitians are facing an exceptionally bleak Christmas and New Year marked by the prospect of more suffering and uncertainty.
The January 12 earthquake killed more than a quarter of a million people and snuffed out what had been some encouraging signs of revival in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest economy. Following hard on the quake’s heels like an apocalyptic horseman, the cholera epidemic has killed more than 2,500 Haitians since mid-October and is still claiming victims daily, confronting the United Nations-led international community with one of its toughest ever humanitarian assistance tasks.
“Yesterday my mother almost died because she got cholera. I had to run with her to the hospital. This Christmas is a Christmas of misery,” Monfort told Reuters as she cleaned with soap and water the inside of the plastic tent where she lives with her children in the Place Saint Pierre quake survivors’ camp in Port-au-Prince’s hillside Petionville district.
There are no lights, tinsel or festive messages in sight in the squalid crowded tent and tarpaulin camps housing tens of thousands of earthquake survivors that carpet most of the available open spaces in rubble-strewn Port-au-Prince. “We cannot decorate dirty tents where we are living in misery … we’re not in the mood to celebrate Christmas,” said Juliette Marsan, 35, another occupant of the Place Saint Pierre, Petionville camp.
Haiti voodoo leader urges halt to cholera lynchings of priests
The head of Haiti’s voodoo religion has appealed to authorities to halt the bloody lynchings of voodoo priests by people who blame them for causing the Caribbean country’s deadly cholera epidemic. Since the epidemic started in mid-October, at least 45 male and female voodoo priests, known respectively as “houngan” and “manbo,” have been killed. Many of the victims were hacked to death and mutilated by machetes, Max Beauvoir, the “Ati” or supreme leader of Haitian voodoo, told Reuters.
“They are being blamed for using voodoo to contaminate people with cholera,” Beauvoir said on Thursday. The killers accused voodoo priests of spreading cholera by scattering powder or casting “spells” and complained that local police and government officials were not doing enough to halt the lynchings and punish the killers. Voodoo is recognized and protected by the constitution as one of Haiti’s main religions.
“My call is to the authorities so they can assume their responsibilities,” said Beauvoir, who fears more attacks against voodoo devotees. Most of the lynchings occurred in the southwest of Haiti but also in the center and the north.
Since emerging in central regions in October, the cholera epidemic has ripped through Haiti’s poor population, still traumatized from a January earthquake. Mainly spread by contaminated water and food, the disease has killed well over 2,500 people and affected all of the nation’s 10 provinces.
The Voodoo religion has been a redoubtable force in the Haitians cultural landmark and a fearsome obstacle that prevent total control by Western powers who have been trying to uproot voodoo in in Haiti for over 500 years. The current killing is instigated by outsiders.
Humanity and Voodoo emerged from Africa. Voodoo is the progenitor of all religions. Africa and Africans in the diaspora should get rid of the second hand religions such as Christianity, Muslim, Hinduism and others. Blacks should go back to the Alma matter-Voodoo .The other races will continue to disrespect Blacks as long Blacks continues to embrace those foreign religions.
Get rid of the Arya Sathya Vedam, the Bible, and the Koran. They were tailored for the interest and glorification of those people. That is why African names and tribes are omitted on them. That is why those people are vilifying the Voodoo and other aspects of the African culture and saying Africans have no history and culture. Respect has to be mutual not one way street.
Voodoo has 50 million follower worldwide that include: Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic,Ghana,Guyana,Haiti,Jamaica,Nige ria,Puerto-Rico,Surinam,Togo,Trinidad, USA, Venezuela and Virgin Islands.
http://www.kenrahn.com/Marsh/Bay_of_Pigs /congo.ht
http://www.trussel.com/prehist/news255.h tm
http://www.realmagick.com/5014/pagan-roo ts-of-the-bible/
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0064737/bio http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/carribea nweb/factfile/Unique-facts-Caribbean12.h tm
http://meta-religion.com/World_Religions /Voodoo/voodoo.htm
Chanting Haitian voodoo celebrants honor quake dead
Dressed in white, shaking decorated gourd rattles and singing praises to “Olorum Papa” (God the Father), several hundred practitioners of Haiti’s voodoo religion held a public ceremony on Sunday to honor those killed in the January 12 earthquake.
While several Christian ceremonies have been held to mourn the hundreds of thousands of quake dead, this was the first national commemoration by Haiti’s voodoo religion, which has had to defend itself against accusations by some Evangelical preachers that it somehow caused the deadly natural disaster.
More than half of Haiti’s nearly 10 million people are believed to practice voodoo, a religion brought from West Africa several centuries ago by slaves forced to work on the plantations of their white masters in what was then the rich French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue. The religion is recognized by Haiti’s state and protected by the constitution.
To the sound of rattles and drums, the celebrants held a Booroum, a voodoo ritual which they believe sends the souls of the dead “under water” so they can be cleansed and return to life as better beings. “Hounkou Bolokou Djavohoun Bohoun”, chorused the worshipers, repeating an ancient voodoo incantation intended to encourage the souls of the dead.
I had been originally been looking for some thing I saw this morning on the computer about what I thought was Haiti and came along this little bit of information. Very interesting. It has been a year since the quake and I can’t imagine anybody anywhere holding in their emotions during the past year.Considering, but knowing voo-doo they probably did.I myself know no voo doo but I wear across around my neck and when I think about it, it moves. Anything is possible in these weird and unsure days here in America. I can only imagine what it is like in Haiti. I intend to find out by studying the peoples of Haiti one year later after the quake. Not study them so much,more like find out where they are and what they do everyday. Where ever they may be. I want to know what they need the most. Maybe…just maybe… I can help.
from Photographers Blog:
The Devil on the loose in Haiti
The incessant drone of the motorcycle under me becomes distant as my mind creates images from the words of an elderly woman in the camp I just visited. “The Devil is on the loose in Haiti. He turns into a dog, a pig or a hen, to move unnoticed in the camps and devour life. Last night he appeared as a dog and took the life of a child.” In the camp everyone knows and speaks of the death, and the strange disappearance of the boy’s mother.
Every form that I have ever imagined devilish beings to take are banished from my mind when this Devil appears. He has become a 7-day diarrhea that “devoured” the life of the child. Is it easier to explain death in the hands of a demon instead of looking around and thinking that it might have been the lack of water, hygiene and food that snatched the life?
The destitution of the Haitian people hits me everywhere I turn. In none of the camps I visited is there a face that doesn’t show the mark of poverty. “The city looks like it was bombed,” says the security expert who accompanies me daily. There is no building, house or street that doesn’t show the effects of nature’s strength. They really were bombed - bombarded by political violence, illiteracy, unemployment, AIDS and extreme poverty. The quake did nothing more than expose to the world the indigence of an entire nation.
The three-day-long Mass held to remember the earthquake's first month moves me in every way. Without realizing it I find myself swaying to the rhythm of the music sung by the throng of mourners dressed in white. The innocent faces of children contrast brutally with the cold stares of looters on Route National #1, the scene of the most dramatic images of the disaster.
Well written,bring tears to my eyes. Most of the world has forgotten about Haiti and move on to other news headline
U.S. missionary in Haiti says trusts God to free her
A Haitian judge made no decision at a hearing on Monday whether to free or prosecute 10 U.S. missionaries accused of kidnapping children, and their leader said she trusted in God they would be cleared and released.
The missionaries, most of whom belong to an Idaho-based Baptist church, were arrested last month trying to take 33 Haitian children across the border to the Dominican Republic 17 days after a magnitude 7 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people in the impoverished Caribbean nation.
They were charged last week with child abduction and criminal association.
“I am trusting God to reveal all truth and that we will be released and exonerated of charges, and we are just waiting for the Haitian process, legal process, to complete,” the group’s leader, Laura Silsby, said after Monday’s hearing.
Read the whole post here.
Irish clergy abuse victims torn between Dublin monument and Haiti aid
One of the healing measures suggested when Ireland’s Catholic clerical sex scandals shocked the country last year was a proposal to erect a monument in Dublin to all the youths abused for decades at schools and orphanages run by religious orders that looked the other way. The idea, proposed by the government’s Ryan report last May, won so much support that half a million euros were earmarked for the project. The government appointed a group to consider what the Irish Times called “the most difficult public art commission in the history of the state.”
It’s just become even more difficult because one group of clerical abuse victims has now said the funds should instead be donated to victims of the Haiti earthquake. The gesture would “genuinely mean more to victims of clerical abuse than a piece of stone on O’Connell Street,” the victims’ group Right of Place said last week at a meeting with Prime Minister Brian Cowen. O’Connell Street is Dublin’s main thoroughfare, an ideal place for any memorial.
Others disagree.
Christine Buckley, who works at the Aislinn Centre to support victims, said she recognised the deep suffering of Haitian people. But Ireland, whose government and citizens have already contributed millions in aid to Haiti, should still be able to afford just over 3 euros per each child affected by abuse, she said.
The Ryan commission that issued the shocking report about abuse committed throughout much of the past century recommended that the monument should have the words of an 1999 government apology inscribed on it:
“On behalf of the State and all citizens of the State, the Government wishes to make a sincere and overdue apology to the victims of childhood abuse for our collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue .”
Beyond that, it is unclear what the monument, if built, would look like. The Irish Times said in November it should be “less like an official war monument and more like a Holocaust memorial,” adding that it had to be “dignified and angry, beautiful and raw, defiant and ashamed.”
Haiti quake raises fears of child-eating spirits
The earthquake that shattered Haiti has unleashed fears that child-eating spirits, mythological figures entrenched in Haitian culture, are prowling homeless camps in search of young prey.
The ‘loup-garou,’ which means ‘wolf man,’ is similar to werewolf legends in other parts of the world, but in Haitian folklore it is a person who is possessed by a spirit and can turn into a beast or even a dog, cat, chicken, snake or another animal to suck the blood of babies and young children.
Haitians fear loups-garous in the best of times and even more since a powerful earthquake wrecked the capital of Port-au-Prince two weeks ago, killing as many as 200,000 people and forcing hundreds of thousands more to sleep outside in vast camps or on the streets.
Most of Haiti’s 9 million people are Roman Catholics but many also practice voodoo, a religion with African roots. The belief in loups-garous cuts across religious identity and is most strongly adhered to among Haiti’s poor, which are the majority in the most impoverished country in the western hemisphere.
These “souls” and “God” concepts that you speak of are about as real and scientific as the wolf-men that these people think are stalking their children! Hah!
VIDEO: Rescuers recover body of Haiti archbishop killed in quake
A Mexican rescue team has recovered the lifeless body of the Roman Catholic Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot of Port-au-Prince from the rubble of his residence a week after the massive earthquake that devastated Haiti. Here’s the Reuters video report:
We ran several pictures of the city’s ruined cathedral here.
Port-au-Prince RC cathedral in ruins after Haiti earthquake
Our photographers in Haiti have produced many sad images of the widespread death and destruction from Tuesday’s massive earthquake, some of which are collected in a slideshow here. Following are shots of the Roman Catholic cathedral in Port-au-Prince in ruins. Among the dead in the quake was Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot, who the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano reported was found lifeless “under the rubble of the archbishop’s residence.”
(Credits: Kena Betancur, Kena Betancur, Jorge Silva, Eduardo Munoz, Reuters TV)
Oldcreative apparently isn’t an old-time Catholic. A collection was held this morning at most Masses this Sunday THROUGHOUT THE WORLD (Catholic=universal)for Haiti.
Now how did oldcreative help “these good citizens in abject need”? Probably the way most secular elites do… With a snarky post…
from Tales from the Trail:
Haiti … Too Much Suffering
Having hurtled by car through the Dominican Republic to the ramshackle Haitian border, I and four other foreign journalists were desperate to reach Port-au-Prince by nightfall. So after exchanging Ramon's beaten-up taxi for the the back of a modern pickup owned by one of Haiti's elite families, our speed stresses were soon put into terrible perspective.
Just a mile or two into Haiti, a group of people stood disconsolately by the road, trying to flag down any vehicle that would stop, and pointing to the collapsed face of a nearby quarry. "There's someone inside there," one of them said, pointing to a pile of rocks.
Before we had time to even consider helping them, our car -- like all the others in the convoy -- had sped off, kicking up dust. The Haitians driving myself and four other foreign journalists into the earthquake zone took the morally nightmarish decision for us. After all, they had their own missing friends and family to find fast in Port-au-Prince.
Later in the day, after several hours winding round collapsed buildings, and corpses which at first we had mistaken for people sleeping, we found a hotel prepared to take us in. Or at least let us sleep in the open-air by the swimming pool. (The Hotel Villa Creole has generously opened its doors and facilities -- despite considerable damage -- to aid-workers and foreign reporters for free.)
As we pulled up, we were stopped by dead bodies lying in the road, and then a crowd of injured Haitians lying and sitting in front of the hotel lobby where some minimal medicines were being dispensed. As we hauled our four large boxes of drinking-water bottles out of the car, one injured lady held out her hand and asked for water. Then another, and another, and another. Perhaps mindful of the horrors of the quarry, we entered the hotel with half our water supplies gone.
Reuters photos by Eduardo Muñoz and Carlos Barria.
Me, logic, and ‘God’
If I were made in ‘his’ image, and ‘he’ was a parent like I, then I have a bit of a problem, here. Because I am a parent of three daughters and one son. If I had to give up my son to save the whole world, I would NOT be happy with jerks like Robertson getting away with dissing the very people I was attempting to save. I would not hire him to work for me. Instead, I would want intelligent representatives who incite the peace my son represented, not fear. I would like to think that anything I would be fashioned after would be more intellectually stable than that (when I was a Christian, this was my justification in rejection of people like Robertson).
Of course, if I were ‘him’ I would do that to them, because if I were ‘him’ I would be callous enough to be able to give up my ‘only begotten son.’ Unlike any real parent could ever do, even if it were to save the world.
That all being aside, biblical mythology has absolutely no bearing on Mother Nature – That’s a human’s idea, not hers. She’s just doing her own thing, the circle of life, one moment at a time, marching right along. Not now or has she ever been subject to humanity. That’s why so many don’t like her, and turn to male deity instead. Or think they do…….. Christianity has many gods, including The Devil, Jesus, Trinity, God, Yahweh, Mother Mary (Maria), Mary Madelena, John the Baptist, Moses, Father Abraham, Michael, Gabriel, just to name a few. That’s not to mention the mythological beings such as demons, angels, and dragons. Oh…….. and flying chariots. So while Christians believe they are ‘monotheistic,’ in the intellectual theological community they are considered multi-theistic. Like those awful Pagans, Native Americans, and (ahem) some traditional Haitians, who haven’t been lost to the fear of an afterlife of hellfire and brimstone by some ass who goes in there disrespecting an entire people’s cultural history. He goes there with the agenda to wipe out their history and culture and make them believe as he does. Sad, sad loss of humanity in the name of Christianity.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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