While Pat Robertson accuses the Haitian’s of making a pact with the devil, and that is the cause of the tragic earth quake (and even goes so far as to call the quake a blessing in disguise)1, the guys over at the Jerusalem post have bigger things to worry about. Matthew Wanger is worried that jewish law isn’t keeping up with our gadgets. Did you know that if you lost your arm and had it replaced that these days you can actually control your artificial arm with your thoughts? I can see straight away what the problem is. If on the sabbath you want to use your arm to do something, would that be considered work and therefore impossible to do on the day of rest?
So here we have the problems of the world on our door steps, unrest in the middle east, probably 100,000 people dead in Haiti, the environment in some sort of melt down and yet amongst all that there are people worried over the dilemma of whether or not using your artificial arm on the sabbath might be work and therefore prohibited.
Well. I know what I’d be doing with the finger on my artificial arm!
Was ‘Wanger’ an intentional malapropism?
big isn’t it.
The truth is that they did make a pact with the devil.
Now the significance you put on that pact I guess has to do with whether you believe the devil is real or not.
But it is one of Haiti’s founding myths.
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/small_axe/v009/9.2laroche.html
According to Haitian national history, the revolutionary war was launched on the eve of a religious ceremony at a place in the north called Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caiman, in French). At that ceremony on August 14, 1791, an African slave named Boukman sacrificed a pig, and both Kongo and Creole spirits descended to possess the bodies of the participants, encouraging them and fortifying them for the upcoming revolutionary war. Despite deep ambivalence on the part of intellectuals, Catholics, and the moneyed classes, Vodou has always been linked with militarism and the war of independence and, through it, the pride of national sovereignty.
So, yeah if there is a devil, Haiti made a pact with it. Might explain why even though Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island, the Dominican Republic has been far more successful.
There isn’t a devil to make a pact with – that notion is just plain stupid and there is no ‘truth’ in that concept. As the title of your link says Haiti’s founding ‘myths’.
As to why the other side of the island is more ‘successful’ that probably has more to do with the huge debt that Haiti has accumulated that western countries insist they pay back
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