Some really sad news from Haiti

Reported on msnbc. Two Dominican relief workers were shot today as they were handing out food to Haitians. For some reason they were shot by Haitians that wanted the food. This is very sad. The workers were rushed back to DR for medical care. I am unsure of their condition.

:cry:

I don't want any relief worker to be hurt, or anyone else for that matter, but for it to be Dominicans just makes it worse somehow due to the history of the island.

the saddest thing..As if there weren't enough tragedies going on the Island.

...that crap about pulling doctors out.

But it won't...

since the one MSNBC doctor stayed there all night taking care of the people but I am not there. The things are moving slow because the roads are so bad and there is no way to get it there any faster. Everything, well almost everything is having to come through DR and that takes a while. When I was there, and that was some time ago, the roads over the mountains were scary to say the least. the roads became one car width in places where they curved around the mountain and you would have to honk your horn as you drove so people would know you were coming. And you would wait and listen before you drove around these places to make sure no car was coming because you could not see. Anyway, things are not always the way they are here and people don't realize that. :shrug:

...over and over out here in the West.

Every time I flipped over to CNN I saw the same piece.

Surely there were more things going on than that...

They were saying it was the UN I believe. My daughter is telling me now that there was an article on the DU today that said that was a mistake. (?)

As for the coverage, after dark there is not much going on because everyone quits what they are doing and go to a safe place according to the news coverage. I have to say that I wonder if the same would be true if this was a European country with white people. And there are dangerous gangs in Europe and other white regions. I don't know it this makes a difference or not, but if it does I don't think it is the Americans that are calling this.

It was a Belgian team, pulled out by their command just overnight.

I appreciate you bringing this here.

<Snip>

Vodouists in the Haitian diaspora are praying on their knees today, just as Catholics and Protestants are. Why did this devastating earthquake have to happen in Haiti, a country already so vulnerable that people live on a dollar a day, where on a good day, the government cannot employ or educate or provide health care for the majority? In Port-au-Prince, they are coping by searching and rescuing, sharing resources, crying, and praying. In Vodou most ritual is about finding balance, putting yourself into equilibrium with the spirits, with your family, and with yourself. In Haiti things are way out of balance. We might say that spirits of death have launched a coup d'état.

My friend and colleague, the artist, educator, and priest of the spirits, Erol Josué, has been praying and crying in Brooklyn. Through Twitter, Facebook, and his cell phone he has learned of at least twenty dead friends in several Port-au-Prince congregations. He told me today that for him, as a spirit-worker, this event is both scientific and symbolic. This is indeed a natural disaster for Josué. But the land in Haiti is a person, he said. We consider it a woman, our mother. "Haïti Chérie," as the well-known ballad goes. She wants to know, 'who will make me beautiful, put clothes on me, and take care of my children?' When you mistreat her, and uproot her trees, when you give her too much responsibility, she is like a woman with cancer. The tumor metastasizes, and explodes.

For Erol Josué, the earthquake was mother nature, the land of Haiti, rising up to defend herself against the erosion, deforestation, and environmental devastation that have been ongoing for the last few decades. "Everybody was smashed to the ground," said Erol. "Rich and poor. But look how symbolic this is. The Palace is smashed, the legislative building, the tax office, and the Cathedral. The country is crushed. We are all on our knees." This Vodou priest is not speaking about divine retribution, as has Pat Robertson. God is not punishing us for disobedience. Erol is speaking about a giant natural rebalancing act, a reaction against human dealings with the ecosystem.

<More>
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/01/voodoos_view_of_the_quake_in_haiti.html

Thought I would put this in your Haitian OP instead of making a new thread.

There is much more to voodoo than just the witch doctor image portrayed on the screen. Unfortunately I don't know much about it myself, and was like everyone else years ago, scared to death when threatened with it.

on Vodou, imv. My own thoughts have been along the lines that after everything Haiti has been through and now this that something good has to come from it and I hope it will slowly rebuild to create a sucessful future for itself..however that may be.

And, speakng of that..here's a vid of Hans Mundry of the Haitian American Relief Committee responding to pat robertson..it's a joy to behold. :cry::)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x423952

when he says the island is divided in half between Haiti and Dominican Republic. Haiti makes up maybe one-third of the island and not half. Next, Haiti has suffered from deforestation but this was not caused just by the poor people getting fire wood. (lol) It was also caused by lumber companies having the freedom to cut down the forest. The Dominican Republic did have very strict laws forbidding the cutting down of their forest. Under bush, the Dominican government was pressured to lighten these laws and to allow American companies to have access to cut there. :grr:

Hans Mundry spoke much more elegantly than pat robertson ever will.

I had to read this book for a class on gender & religion a couple of years ago, and thought it was excellent -- very warm and engaging. It's written by Karen McCarthy Brown, who was an anthropologist studying voudou by the participant observation method in New York back in the late 70s. Mama Lola, or Alourdes, was a Haitian voudou priestess living in America. The two became friends through Brown's attempts to study Alourdes and her family, which included trips to Haiti, and immersion in the voudou religion. I won't tell you how it ends up, but I will say that what happens to Brown may be pleasantly surprising to some. It really is a wonderful book -- it's actually a memoir, not a study -- and if you'd like to get a sense of what the Haitian people are like (or at least how they were back in the late 70s), as well as an inside view of Haitian religion and voudou practice, then this book would be an excellent read. I loved it! The name of the book is Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Amazon has it for $21.36: http://www.amazon.com/Mama-Lola-Priestess-Brooklyn-Comparative/dp/0520224752/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263719863&sr=8-1

My dissertation was on women creating ritual -- but about Vodou I know very, very little.

Thank you so much for giving us this article -- I'll read the rest of it tomorrow.

Hekate

That sounds like a really interesting dissertation, too. :)

Never ask someone about their dissertation unless you are prepared for a looooong conversation. :P LOL

The title is Love, Death, and Underworld Journeys: Women's Rituals as Myth-Retrieval and Myth-Making.

Hekate

Well, your title makes it sound even more intriguing! LOL

The paper I wrote (around 30 pages -- it was a grad level course) for the class I mentioned above was on gay and women's spirituality in modern America (From Radical Rebels to Spiritual Seekers:
The Convergence of Spirit and Politics in Late Twentieth Century America). So, anyhow, at least my interest is valid! ;)

It's about the feminist spirituality movement.

Rosemary Radford Ruether (Sexism and God-Talk; Gaia and God; among many others) is more political, though -- I went to a women's interfaith spiritual retreat (I may have been the only neopagan) and was delighted to hear her give a lengthy talk on economics and Third World women. Others there were confused; one finally asked her about it and she said an understanding of economics in the world was absolutely integral to understanding the plight of Third World women and of their spirituality and of their relationship to the destruction of the ecology around them by multinational corporations.

Yikes. It's 3 am again. I need to go to bed. See you tomorrow. :hi:

Hekate

I have Ruether's Goddesses and the Divine Feminine, but haven't read any of her other work. Yet. Gaia and God sounds interesting. I would love to have been there for that talk (she's absolutely correct)!

I'm off to bed, too. Have become way too much of a night-owl this winter...

Two men came into the country without security because they wanted to help the people. They brought food and supplies to give to the people. (remember how we felt when Katrina happened) Anyway, as they were handing out the food they were both shot with a shotgun. The men were air lifted out and taken back to the DR. There was a report that one man was shot in the face and died, but now they say no that he is still alive. We will just have to wait and see.