Alice Smeets | Blog

Voodoo in Souvenance

April 15th, 2009 at 05:50 (Haiti)

Last weekend I was on a Voodoofestival in a place close to Gonaive. I went there together with Natacha (the director of the school of Haiti Care), friends of Natacha and Keely, an american girl I met on through www.couchsurfing.com and her boyfriend.

We left Port-au-Prince in a usual Haitian bus. This means: the old American schoolbuses that landed in Haiti after they were so destroyed that noone in the US would use them anymore. Instead of placing 2 people on a seat (which are meant for 2 people), they place 3. So you sit their - packed like sardines for 4 hours in a country with a really hot climat and a lot of dust on the roads - waiting that this journey will end soon. The road is really bad and the driver often drives slalom around all the holes in the streets… or the street is one big hole for a few or even many kilometers.

We arrived in Souvenance finally and were all exhausted. RARAs were going on the hole afternoon and Keely (also a photographer) and me took pictures. RARAs is kind of a Voodoo dancing parade that is always celebrated around the Easter period.

Saturday was the starting day of the real festival. People, all dressed in white started to have ceremonies, danced in trance and some fell into a trance and moved, crawled on the floor and screamed… finally arriving at a tree where they put their feet underneath its roots and stood there for hours…

Sunday was the main day… probably the most shocking and crazy things I have ever seen. First a Voodoo priest tells me that it is all about white magic and good things, second I see how they sacrifice animals. It was not the sacrificing itself that was shocking - it was the way how they did it.

It started with the goats: The cut the throat of the goat and let it bleed. Like this the will dance around about 15 minutes, let the goat bleed and torture it to dead. Then they put it on the floor and everyone in the room sticks his finger into his throat and puts the blood on their white dresses or even drinks it. Just after that they will carry the still living animal outside and kill it finally.

A woman putting the goats blood in her mouth.

Everyone sticks his finger into the throat of the goat.

The killing of the chicken is even worse:

First the Voodoo priest pulls off some feathers,  than he breaks both wings, than he takes the tongue of the chicken and pulls it completely out (the chicken is still alive) and at the end he turns its head and trows it on the floor. I don’t know how long in lays there, but it is not killed right after… It is a real torture and I was just so shocked.. I could not take good pictures… I wanted to cry… They killed one chicken after another… In total they kill 101 animals this week (from Saturday to the Friday after).

Blood coming out of the chicken after they tore out its tongue.

The Voodoo priest praying before killing the next chicken.

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They also killed one big cow.. I could not really see what was going on, but I saw that they started to pull of the skin when the cow was still alive…

During the killing of the cow the crowd hold knifes in their hands as part of the ritual.

The cow after…

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On Sunday afternoon they also took a bath in “sacred” waters.

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During the whole day, people fell into trance and went to this one specific tree to place their feet underneath its roots.

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In the evening they took the hooves and heads of the killed animals and carried them around while dancing.

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Everything was really shocking for me… I didn’t know much about Voodoo and even though I knew they were sacrifising animals regurlarly, I didn’t know how brutal it was… Keely and me were joking about letting Greenpeace know about what is happening there…

I’m still recovering from that experience… And I don’t know what more to say…