Blog #4

Vodou is an oral tradition practiced by extended families that inherit familial spirits, along with the necessary devotional practices, from their elders. In the cities, local hierarchies of priestesses or priests “children of the spirits”, and ritual drummers  comprise more formal “societies” or “congregations”. In these congregations, knowledge is passed on through a ritual of initiation in which the body becomes the site of spiritual transformation.

The Haitian voodoo is not only a religion recreated by the African slaves in the French colony called the Hispanola that included Haiti and the Dominican Republic, it is on the contrary a humanistic religion, a set of cultural traditions that constitute the foundation that unites the Haitian people in times of crisis and saves him from despair. Voodoo seeks to obtain the invulnerability of the believer by his circumstances with the higher divinity. In this way the believer tends to identify himself with the deity or with the deified objects, to become invulnerable as the same divinity. It is a religious practice that is not closed to the appearance of new luases (divinities). Man is one with nature, one with his gods, one with his environment, voodoo. The voodoo cults are syncretic from the colonial era, they mixed with the Christians.

Voodoo is more than a synthesis of different African beliefs because it incorporates significant influences from Christianity. The word voodoo comes from the Fon language, spoken in Benin, meaning "a kind of power which is mysterious and, at the same time, fearsome." Voodoo is invested in all parts of Haitian life and has a considerable influence on each person and on each natural element. The voodoo pantheon consists of many Loas, which are generally associated with a Catholic saint. Despite the existence of these Loas, voodoo is essentially monotheist; in their conception, the Loas are neither more or less than the intermediaries between God and the human ones.

Blog #2

Audience- Young girls
Theme- " Don't judge a book by its cover".

In "Tetiyette and the Devil", as I read the first two paragraphs, I notices that the author was using animal names to camouflage the Devil....."the goat","the pig".....
"But there was a devil roaming the neighborhood. For a long time he had been wanting to eat up the young girl."
He was trying to make him look presentable in front of the mother and the young girl. 

We could save ourselves from the problems that life puts us and that God sends us to test each day of our lives, besides that, we have a more powerful obligation in our hands that we do not take advantage of that is listening to our parents. We must give credit to the lived experiences and experiences that our parents have gained over the course of their lives. They do not necessarily have to make every decision or direction of the children's lives but give them the tools, depends on oneself if they take them or not.

In the story of "Tetiyette and the Devil" was narrated by an anonymous writer and told by a seventeen-year-old Guadeloupean girl. The story is based on a girl who is looking for that someone to spend her life away from her parents and for things of life this leads her to meet the devil, a pig and a goat symbolizing the bad influences. Without thinking twice she choose the devil for his rich appearance and money that could make any woman fall in love, after her mother told her that it was not a good idea, However, she doesn't listen to her mother's advice and the consequences. At the end, the devil closed eyes deceived everyone and his brother saved it by opening the stomach of the devil. This reminds me a lot of the story of Little Red Riding Hood, as the wolf found a little red riding hood in the forest and faked his true intentions in front of her and then came to the house of the grandmother and ate her and pretended to be her to convince to Little Red Riding Hood and finally the gentleman came to save them and the only way was opening his stomach. The comparison of goats with pigs is one of the ways that the author uses to signal this. The audience could be adults or adolescents. Everything that our eyes admire is not exactly gold, it is a rotten old table that wants to damage a house that is built with strong wood is the moral of this story.

Blog #1
Haiti

Language- Haitian Creole and French
Population-11,112,945
Location- Haiti is a Caribbean country that shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic to its east.

-Haiti is The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and it is also the third-largest country in the Caribbean.

-Haiti is also one of the Most deforested nations of the world. Poor agricultural practices, overgrazing, intensive demand for charcoal and scarcity of land are the leading causes.

-Haiti is the Second oldest independent nation in the Western Hemisphere after The United States. It gained its independence from France in 1804.

-It was Ruled by seventy different dictators between 1804 and 1915.

- Haitian music is vibrant, danceable, and most often religious or politically charged. Because of the country's location in the Caribbean as well as the rich history of the isle of Hispaniola, Haiti's music has French, African, native Taino, and even Spanish influences.

Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdY7wBJaUSg

About Me...
 My name is Anabel Garcia, I'm 19 years old, currently a Freshman at Georgia Gwinnett College and I'm studying Business Management and Criminal Justice. I enjoy playing sports such as baseball, basketball and volleyball. Exercising is another way for me to be stress-free. I'm from the Dominican Republic and I'm really excited to learn more in this class about my country and of course the other islands in the Caribbean.