Voodoo at the Waterfall

Hello all,

I'm sure you all expected my next post to be about our new apartment, but you'll need to wait at least another post for that one. As much as I love our new place, I had a great experience last weekend I think you'll be more interested in hearing about.

Last weekend we went to Saut d'Eau, which literally translates from French to waterfall (in Creole it's just Sodo, because, as my colleague put it, the French just add in too many extra letters when they try and spell stuff). Saut d'Eau a town plus the waterfalls themselves about an hour inland north-east from Port-au-Prince, and last weekend happened to be the anniversary of a supposed sighting of the Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel. The story is kind of fishy, but apparently a priest saw the virgin appear on a palm tree a couple of hundred years ago, and not wanting it to turn into a superstitious thing, he cut the tree down. Nevertheless, it turned superstitious and both Catholics and Voodoo-practitioners have associated something religious with the place. There is a pilgrimage to the waterfalls every year in July to bathe in the waterfalls using herbs swirled around and blessed in a calabash (or you can just use plain soap).

Ian making his way up the waterfalls

We drove up on a Saturday and went straight to the waterfalls, where the festival atmosphere had started a bit. We passed lots of stalls selling soap, herbs, alcohol and more, and President Martelly had been at the waterfalls only a few minutes before we arrived. The waterfalls are quite big, you can either get into them from the bottom or the top, but it's possible to climb up or down through the waterfalls. They are also a lot of places to just sit down and have the water run down all around you. It was a really relaxing afternoon, and it's somewhere easy enough to drive to, spend a few hours, and go back to the city on a weekend or with visitors (ahem).

We stayed overnight at a friend of a friend's, a Haitian that lived in Montreal driving a taxi for 16 years and has come back to enjoy retirement in his home country. He was very welcoming and had a lot of people around for the festival anyways, so a few more were no big deal. At night he had a lot of friends over, and got this "troubadou" band to come and play while everyone ate. Troubadou is one of the local music styles here, quite African and super cool. There was a guy on a banjo, a maracas guy, a drummer, and a guy with a bass that was actually a big box he sat on with a hole in the middle, and different lengths of knives over the hole that he would pluck for the sound. These aren't the same guys, but this gives you an idea of what I'm talking about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmcvQ8-Aoq0.

One of my fav photos - scrub scrub scrub!

The next day we went back to the waterfalls, and it was a LOT busier than the day before, I bet there were at least a thousand people in the waterfall at any given time. We stayed up at the top of the falls where we were the day before, and spent a couple hours just watching the real festival-goers do their thing. There were a lot of people going through the bathing ritual - in fact I saw so much flesh that it felt weird going back to Port-au-Prince and seeing people in clothes! No one was running around naked, but everyone was in their underwear, and given the force of the waterfalls, there was little to be left to the imagination. If I ever had any doubt about how a man washes himself, it was put to rest last Sunday, I can tell you that. We also saw some voodoo priests with a gathering of followers, normally women, and he would swirl around the herbs in their calabash and wash them all up and down. There were rah-rah bands around, lots of chanting and a bit of singing and you can tell it was generally just enjoyed by all.

Better to be upstream than down

When we were leaving the city we encountered one of the major problems with holding a festival with only two roads in and out - traffic. Our driver had done the smart thing and parked on the outskirts of the city, but the traffic to get there was horrendous. There were about 10 of us in one truck (between the seats inside and the flatbed), slowly crawling along to try to get to the other car. Finally we decided it would be easier for those of us going to the other car to hop on a moto taxi, so that's just what we did. We had a mini-convoy of three motos with 6 people plus drivers that easily weaved through the traffic and got out to the car in 5 minutes. Ian and my driver had the speaker system set up to his phone and was blasting the tunes while the moto in front of us was beeping along to the beat. It was just one of those situations where you had to laugh...