HAITI VOODOO TEMPLES OPEN FOR COVID-19 PATIENTS

If medicine can’t cure, then voodoo will. This might be the best time for Haiti’s voodoo leaders to test just how effective the rituals and concoctions of the Afro-Caribbean religion would be in battling the COVID-19 pandemic, which has affected 5.3 million people worldwide and killed more than 350,000 individuals.

In an article written by Andfe Paultre and Robenson Sanon in Port-au-Prince for Reuters on May 25, 2020, voodoo priests have prepared the sacred initiation chambers of their temples to receive patients. More than half of Haiti’s 11 million people are believed to practice voodoo, a religion brought from West Africa centuries ago by enslaved men and women and practiced clandestinely under French colonial rule.

In Haiti, where Western healthcare services are scarce and too expensive for many, inhabitants often rely on the herbal remedies and ritual practices of their voodoo “houngan” priest or “mambo” priestess. Haitian Voodoo “Ati” or supreme leader Carl Henri Desmornes said in an interview at his “gingerbread house” in Port-au-Prince he knew there would be a deluge of patients at their temples.

While the virus took root slowly in the poorest country in the Americas, in the last two weeks the number of confirmed cases has nearly quintupled to 865 while reports of a mysterious “fever” are spreading. “Voodoo practitioners - the Houngans and Mambos in particular - have the responsibility to look after the wellbeing of the population,” said Desmornes, 60, who was a music promoter before becoming the Ati. “They have received the powers and the knowledge to put in practice.” #COVID19