On Haitian Witch Doctors (READY TO EDIT)

One of my friends has unseriously been getting into witchcraft. I say unseriously because it sounds like it’s mostly just a tik-tok rabbit hole. So far she’s told me about writing names of people on piece of paper and putting them in the freezer - supposedly to bring them some form of minor bad luck. Honestly, given my tendency toward irritability, it sounds like my weekly shopping routine around town could be symptomatic. But I can’t think of anyone who has my name in their freezer. Her journey made for interesting party conversation - and later got me yelled at for not sharing about the time I spent a couple of weeks in Haiti witnessing - Evangelical Christian style - to some of the most powerful witch doctors in the country. I had forgotten. 

So here goes. I’m going to try to relive those days. I was in 7th grade, so it’s a little vague. But it’s made such a big impact on me, even if I don’t always remember to talk about it at parties. 

My dad is evangelical pastor - so was my grandpa and so is my uncle, for that matter. So it wasn’t out of context to go on a mission trip to a different country. And I’ve wanted to see the whole world since before 7th grade, so even though I didn’t know a ton about Haiti as a 7th grader in Akron, Ohio, I knew that I eventually wanted to get to Haiti anyway. I was pumped. I also didn’t understand that most mission trips were typically for doing some sort of manual labor - building houses, rebuilding damage from natural disasters, running various food or housing programs, etc. It just made sense that a mission trip would involve only traveling miles into the backcountry to tell people who hadn’t seen a white person before about Jesus. That’s what all the missionaries did in the books my elders read to me. 

I’m not sure what my teachers and other adults in my life outside the church thought of my trip. I don’t remember telling a lot of people at school. In fact, the first time I remember opening up about it outside of church (although I’m sure I wasn’t secretive about it) was on a road trip with a group of football buddies and our head coach my senior year - and I remember our head coach was pretty blown away. But I could see some folks thinking that it was irresponsible for parents to bring their 7th grader on such a trip. I would vehemently disagree with those people. I thought it was awesome. Very interesting. And It gave me a great respect for the way of life of Haitians in general, but those practicing voodoo as well. It was well planned, with local contacts and leaders, appropriate protection, and lovely accommodations. Honestly, without our connections, you couldn’t take this trip. No travel agency has connections with witch doctors. The church has a unique corner on this part of the travel market. 

There was a whole team of us comprised of kids and adults. My younger brother was the youngest, in fifth grade, and I think my friend’s older sister, in high school, made up the older end of the kids’ spectrum. So maybe 15 or 20 folks, total, including 5 or 6 kids. To give you a frame of reference for my state of mind - I was pumped about the older two girls because I thought they were hot. We flew a normal commercial flight into Miami, but had to stay overnight and take an old DC-10 airplane that had to stop for fuel in the Bahamas to make it to Cape Haitian. I still remember the runway when we landed. There were goats and cattle roaming through mostly mud and trash beside it, stopping to eat when they could find grass. There was a menial fence keeping them off the actual runway, a few feet beside them. 

Naturally, it was hot. I hate heat, so pointing out that an Island in the Caribbean is hot in the late spring is less about reality and more about how uncomfortable I was, immediately. Right away, in the heat, people started asking for money, or things in general. I was carrying a ripped envelope from a card my girlfriend had given me for when we landed. I offered that and it was taken immediately with a big smile in return. That genuinely shocked me. The landscape was beautiful in a typical Caribbean sense - palm trees, seemingly thick forests in the distance. In the near view, at and around the airport, there were shacks and trash seemingly everywhere. It was by far the most interesting place I had ever been - and even as a seventh grader I had been to almost every state and a couple countries - and I was honored to be on such a great adventure.

I forget what the first few days were like. The missionaries who were hosting us ran a radio station, so we spent a few days getting acclimated on their compound. It was walled and protected by armed guards and barbed wire and shattered glass on top of all the walls. In retrospect, it really stands out as stuff white people would do. You know, move down to haiti, not feel safe, so set up an impenetrable compound from which to project their message about Jesus, which may or may not completely ruin your economic prospects as a witch doctor (or practitioner of voodoo). But, to be fair, these were also the only non-governmental white people with an interest in the lives of the Haitians. They weren’t still living in Seattle or Ohio or North Carolina praying for the Haitians once a week. Their fates were tied to the greater successes and failures of the country and people of Haiti. And whether you think they’re right or wrong in their beliefs, they did a lot of practical good in feeding, clothing, and engaging and living with their neighbors. That was apparent to me as a 7th grader. I haven’t kept up with them lately, but I can only imagine the chaos that occurred during the 2022 political upheaval. A compound with a couple armed guards and thin brick walls is only so secure amidst a chaos that US citizens can’t fathom. 

I remember waking up early every morning to loud cowbirds - these big black birds that squawked louder than chickens, starting every morning around 6 am. Nobody slept in too long. It was almost unmanageable as a pre-teenager. 

Then we were off and into the coastal backcountry. 

We stayed first at a hotel that had beautiful dinners with what is still some of best bread I’ve ever had. The dining room was dimly lit and composed of old brick and visible wood beams. There was a lovely yard area with high walls around to separate it from the the street, which had a lot of trash all over it and a lot of animals roaming: goats, chickens, dogs, cats, and the various birds that would drop in to pick at the trash. The yard went all the way to the beach, but there was trash piled several feet high. You couldn’t see the sand, if there was any. A short cement pier was high enough to be above the trash in most spots. I remember walking out and looking over the trash: articles of clothing, plastic bags and cups, shoes, small electrical appliances, a few drums. A lot of it had just washed ashore and didn’t seem to have been dumped directly onto the beach. The water wasn’t covered with floating trash, though, like on some southeastern Asian beaches I would visit as an adult. I was still too young to understand how pollution in the ocean worked, and I didn’t quite understand how so much trash had accumulated on what could’ve been a beautiful coastline. 

The people on the streets outside the hotel were fascinating, and very receptive. They were a welcome entertainment from the adults on the trip, whom I loved but didn’t find particularly interesting long-term as a middle-schooler. There were so many kids! And they were all fascinated by me and my white skin. They would crowd around quickly as I came out of the hotel, shooing goats and dogs away to allow a crowd to gather. Anything I did or said was curious to them. 

They very much wanted anything I was willing to give away. We intended to give away all the clothes we packed for the trip. Once I brought out an outfit for a kid who seemed particularly like he needed it. I had been told specifically not to do this, to give the clothes to the missionaries to distribute in their own way. And my parents were right, it proved to be a mistake. Everyone wanted something, so I had to quickly go back inside. But they were also keen to take anything else I was willing to give away: scrap pieces of paper, the orange peel from breakfast, egg shells. They had big smiles and a type of love for life I could tell I hadn’t encountered before. We would communicate with hand gestures while we incoherently babbled in our different languages to each other. Many of them knew a little English and wanted badly to practice. Laughter was hearty and regular. We played a lot of hand games, almost constantly touching. Creating handshakes was a popular interaction. Each peer wanted to have a different sequence. I remember realizing how much stronger many of the kids were, and I remember starting to become uncomfortable one time after being surrounded by so many people who were so obviously stronger than me. Still, it didn’t take long before I would ask to go back outside to walk the street and interact with the kids who would quickly congregate. 

Voodoo drums were audible every night from most of the spots we stayed in Haiti except for the main missionary compound. But they were loudest from that hotel on the coast. The roof was open with a dining and seating area overlooking the back yard and ocean. The yard was walled, with broken glass on top with barbed wire on top. Inside was a little walking trail around garden fruits and vegetables. The hotel used them in the meals. Sunsets were truly remarkable. The heat of the day would finally start to dissipate, and the breeze, although it smelled of trash, would pick up and the whole group would sit and talk until the breeze slowed and the mosquitos got bad. The drums would start as a we were heading to bed. I snuck out back to the roof a few nights to look out over the landscape and be by the sea in such an amazing environment. Pockets of light would be visible over the landscape, the drums wafting loudest from those areas over the dark and intriguing landscape. 

We were there about a week. 

We started talking to witch doctors on the first day. 

We would talk to a few each day. They would host us - usually under a wicker-roofed, open walled witch-doctor-office type of hut. The hut had a concentrated amount of spiritual power pent up in various artifactual decorations. There were glass soda bottles buried in the ground, usually with the bottle opening sticking out of the dirt not unsubtly, but safely for walking purposes. There would typically be a 3-5ft wooden cross posted in the middle of the hut. Bottles would be hanging from the cross, and often doll heads would be on top of the bottles. For example, the voodoo-doll witch doctor had rug-rat doll heads attached to her bottles hanging from her cross. On top of the cross - typically, but not always - was either an animal or human skull. It’s still one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen. 

There were specialties within the Witch Doctors’ services. Some Witch Doctors specialized in voodoo doll torturing - one had hundreds of voodoo dolls pinned in various ways to a large Oak tree immediately beside her voodoo area. Another witch doctor, Colo (pronounced like Cola, but with an O; I still think of Coke when I hear his name) had a nest of bees that he allegedly could control. He sold them out to sting and attack other people. Others, who were maybe less powerful or less specialized, would have more general set-ups with bottles and crosses but without expensive voodoo drum sets or specialty tools like dolls or bees. 

All of the witch doctors were able to support families. Often, women would come sit with us around the fire to talk. Some would be breast feeding babies. I forget how much nudity I had experienced with girlfriends at that age, but it wasn’t as much as I experienced sitting around talking to the witch doctors. We had seen people taking showers in their homes as we drove past on the street. When the government decided to widen a street, they simply demolished the street facing walls of the homes on the street. The homes then became like model-home diagrams, or doll-homes, with the front facing wall removed so you could see into each room within the structure. I saw men and women bathing in rooms now openly over-looking the street on the way from the airport.

We sat around in the voodoo huts telling them through a translator that we had come from far away - Ohio - to tell them that Jesus loves them and wanted to be their personal Lord and Savior. They were all polite, and seemed good natured and interested in us. I’m not sure how many of them had seen white people before. It certainly wouldn’t have been too common. We were novel. Interesting. Easy to talk to through the translator. I never did any of the talking except to say hi, smile, and also be polite. The conversations often drew long and tended to bore me. The message was always the same, and from what I could tell tended to be the focus more than simple small talk. Everything was directed by the translator, who was local and understood the conversational customs. Sometimes even the adults with our group didn’t talk much, waiting for long periods to hear the translator’s summation of what was happening in the conversation. Some witch doctors were more receptive than others, but they were all polite and curious enough to sit for a while and talk. 

Besides talking to the witch doctors, which we didn’t do every day, we handed out solar-powered radios to all types of Haitians. We had several hundred. They were to be given out strategically, to get the gospel message - given out through daily programming on the only Christian station available on the radio -  to maximum ears. 

We gave them out at a local jail. Most of the cells were small, and over filled - 15 or 30 people in one cell. In some cells there was no room to lie down at all. In other cells, maybe someone was lying down, but right up against someone else, and it was unclear if they could move from that position throughout the day. I only saw a couple cells with a bathroom inside them. We handed radios to the prisoners strategically so that the maximum amount of prisoners would be within earshot of the little speaker. The two cells with the most prisoners were beside each other, and they got a total of 2 radios because they were so close. There was only one station, so there was no concern about fighting over which station was playing. I still remember the hands coming through the bars, grasping for a little rectangular yellow radio with a black speaker face. I think it was broadcast in Kriol and French - the two main languages. 

In my opinion, as a kid, the most exciting times on the trip were all the sights and things we did when we weren’t talking to witch doctors or handing out radios. Many of the houses didn’t have roofs, so there would just be stacks of cinderblocks stacked up to form rooms and the layout of a house. There just wouldn’t be a roof over head. We heard a story of a man who dragged a big piece of rippled tin over 20 miles to use for a roof. It took him several days. Or sometimes a tarp would be layered on top. But almost everything was visible from the van as we passed in the street. Especially through the bigger cities. Nudity. Showering and going to the bathroom in the toilets as holes in the floor. Cooking over a wood fire. Chasing kids around. Eating. Drinking. Hanging around. All of life was on display on the car rides.

The bulk of this story, though, is about Colo, the witch doctor who controlled the bees. He was a tall, good-looking man in his 40s. I was told he was the most powerful witch doctor in the county, and the brother of a more powerful witch doctor who lived in the county adjacent. He supported a large family of multiple women, who each had multiple children. It was unclear whether they were lovers/wives or whether they were sisters/extended family. His mother also lived with him, but we didn’t see any other men while we were there. I was under the impression he had a set up resembling a harem, but I have no reason to believe I was competent to understand what was going on except that he was providing for a large number of people who were family in one way or another. 

One evening my dad - the only pastor on the trip - had talked to Colo through a translator. He had gone through the typical salvation pitch that is so central to Evangelical Christianity. In this case, it was something like: Believe that Jesus died for your sins, to free you from the devil, for whom you ultimately work, and that Jesus wants you to believe on him and be saved from Satan, who currently controls your whole life. This is a particularly hard sell to a Haitian witch doctor because it meant leaving an upper middle class lifestyle, and possibly impoverishing your entire family, including all of your children. 

The gospel message was pretty familiar to these people. They did seem to think that they were fundamentally working for the Christian devil - at least when the evangelical gospel message was presented to them directly. That kind of surprised me because Catholicism is the other official religion of Haiti. I thought maybe voodoo wouldn’t directly ask for power from the antagonist of the other main religion in the country. But the two interacted very interestingly throughout the country, and talking to witch doctors about the Bible and the devil made for lively and engaging conversation - at least for the adults and the translators. 

After meeting with my dad, Colo said that he spent all night literally wrestling a physical Satan, who came to his bed while he was asleep and tormented him for speaking for so long and so readily to a Christian pastor. Satan was pissed. So as soon as Satan left, Colo called the translator and said he needed to see the same pastor immediately. It was 5 am. So my dad went back with a team of folks - my friend Justin’s dad, Dave, who was trying to document the whole trip with his hi-8 video recorder, and a few others. Dave charged it every night and filmed as much as he could every day (without annoying everyone, namely his wife; I remember thinking he was pretty cool). His camera had full battery at the arrival at the witch doctor. 

During the course of the morning Colo detailed the previous night and explained that he wanted to convert to Christianity. He described a physical Satan beating and wrestling with him. He seemed bruised and cut, but I hadn't’ seen him the evening before. My dad and the translator walked him through a conversion process to Jesus Christ and away from his voodoo witch doctoring. The process was deadly-serious and took a long time. He had to get rid of all of his voodoo tools, status indicators, special services equipment, and everything from his old life. He was literally ending his business, his old way of life and starting a new one. He was fleeing Satan and running to Jesus. He would go on to train to be a carpenter. But that day the translator indicated that Colo had no idea what he would do for future income. His family was very upset - they were all very aware that their livelihoods hung in the balance of Colo’s radical decision. 

Their house was made out of cinder blocks and had a full roof made of tin with ripped up bedsheets as doors. It was considered a nice house, and sat maybe 70 yards from the voodoo hut and a full and nice looking roofed and walled shed to store all his voodoo tools, drums, and other paraphernalia. He had a lot of livestock, too: tens of chickens, 5 or 6 goats, a few cows. They were able to get most of their food from their own animals and some gardening. 

He also had a separate and fairly large toilet and washing area. It consisted of a trough-style catching tray for a pumped faucet bringing water out of the ground. There was also a sink attached to the trough section that drained into a hole in the ground. Across from that was a couple holes in the ground - to be used for pooping and peeing. It was one of the cleaner set-ups we had seen. 

Colo’s renunciation involved a lot of talking with my dad, the team, and the translator. Most of this was taking place around the washing area. I wasn’t present for this morning activity and conversation. But Dave was filming it all. Colo was ridding himself of all of his status handkerchiefs - different colors to connote different levels and abilities - his rings, which symbolized and carried actual power, and anything else that he wore every day as part of his job. Dave said Colo put his handkerchiefs down the hole in the ground for pooping and looked up, right at the camera. The battery died almost immediately. It had been fully charged. Dave’s filming ended abruptly. Colo seemed otherwise unperturbed by the camera, continuing to speak with the team and take off his voodoo artifacts. 

The toilet holes were the closest thing to permanently ridding himself of such powerful objects. The understanding, as I was told, was that as he renounced Satan and rid himself of all the power Satan had adorned him in, he was running to Jesus and would be protected under the blood of Jesus if he confessed and had truly destroyed all of Satan’s stronghold on him and his house. So, for example, the fact that his rings and status handkerchiefs were simply in the equivalent of a permanent porter-potty pile was irrelevant. He wasn't trying to get them back. He was renouncing his practice, his master, Satan, and his entire economic livelihood, before Satan could come back and wrestle him further. God would now protect him under the blood of Jesus. It was a profound shift. Colo had, overnight, decided to quit his career and pursue Jesus in the face of a very real and physical Satan. 

While all this was happening, Justin, my brother, mother, and I were shopping at a nearby market. The market was made up mostly of women who would sit beside their food or items for sale. The food was mostly small, roasted animals being circled by flies. Plenty of rodents, but also some chickens. Each layout fitted well under a tree or on a flat spot on the uneven earth. There was no grass, just hard, flat dirt. But the area was well shaded - a welcome relief from the sun. Other stations had things like dolls, flip-flops, and other trinkets for sale, mostly handmade, and a few from factories. Each person was keen to talk and show us their things. 

Suddenly, someone came shouting that I was to come immediately, Justin too, because our dads had been talking to a big and powerful witch doctor in the area. We ran to the car. We navigated the uneven earth in old 4x4 cars - the other group had the van. 

We pulled up and I saw everyone tearing the leaf branches off the roof of the voodoo hut. They were preparing to burn it. I could see the cross, typically displayed in the middle of the hut, flat on the ground. Bottles were still buried: Colo said the spirits would just leave the bottles when the hut burned. It wasn’t the most complex hut we had seen, but the shed beside it was nicer than anything we had seen before. 

Everyone started pulling out voodoo items from the shed. I joined, hoping to get a glance of what else was in the his shed. I saw a baby coffin with a knife in it. A child’s coffin with a knife stuck into it - Justin and I immediately recognized it as a child sacrifice tool but weren’t sure if this man actually killed children. It could’ve been ceremonial in a way that didn’t involve actually killing children. We had heard about a technique that involved drizzling chicken blood on a person’s body to heal or purify them. Though, I think this could’ve also been a way of preparing an actual human sacrifice, too. 

He had a lot of voodoo drums. He said he wasn’t allowed to burn those because they weren’t his. They were his brother’s, they were quite expensive, and it wouldn’t be worth it to have to pay him back the money for burning his drums. His brother was a more powerful witch doctor in the county adjacent. A very far journey by foot. There were a number of carved sticks. There were lots of dolls and cartoon heads on the fire already.

I turned around and saw Colo convulsing on the ground. He reached into his pocket and painfully jerked out another silk handkerchief. Someone came over and tossed it immediately into the fire. The convulsions slowly settled and he lay on the ground lifeless-looking. Seeing him like that was scary.

The fire quickly got big. Eventually the shed beside it needed to be burned. That’s when I saw the witch doctor gingerly get off the ground and seem to engage with the bees. He said something - commanded them - and they went inside. Flames continued to get to scale for the amount of flaming items, and a bunch of the missionary men, my dad and Dave, took the witch doctor the few yards up to the house, and began counseling him on his new, terrifying future he was about to embark upon. They had to contend with the possible likelihood that Satan would come back. And it would be bad when he came back. 

Strangely enough, Colo’s brother started walking up the driveway. His brother said he had been warned by Satan that his brother was ruining his life. He was very upset. They had a verbal altercation at the bottom of the driveway. The drums were brought down to the brother in the driveway.

I didn’t actually see him do this. But when he was burning them - a long story, I’ll get into it - he seemed like he intentionally made contact with the bees and asked them to go into their hive, which was growing on the shed that contained all of his other voodoo equipment. So they went into the hive and the witch doctors and those helping set the hive on fire and the bees stayed in the hive, for the most part, and seemed to die an intentional death by fire. It’s still one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen.

The roads were so completely covered in potholes that we could never travel more than 20 miles an hour. We spent many 12 hour days in the van to travel maybe 100 miles. There was no air-conditioning in the van. So we spent hours drenched in our own sweat on the days when we switched hotels or went particularly far to meet a witch doctor. 

None of the hotels had hot water. But the daytime temperatures were so hot, I couldn’t complain because even the cold water was so refreshing before bed. I remember lying in bed listening to the voodoo drums, feeling the cool, stinky sea air cool me on my mattress. Those were nights I’d never forget. I had no idea at the time. I just knew they were interesting. 

I remember the group handling all the events of the trip in pretty standard order. The living conditions of the Haitians were shocking, but the adults had prepared the kids, and the missionaries who lived in the country had prepared the leaders of the trip for what to expect. Of course, I’m not sure many people can ever prepare to talk to witch doctors, and just bringing your kids along to see if anything happens isn’t something many millennial parents are likely to want their kids to sign up. But spending long days traveling very slowly in hot church vans as they meander along the hole-ridden back-country roads of Haiti to talk to witch doctors is still one of the most interesting experiences I’ve ever had. 

Colo took up training for a trade. I think he started woodworking and carpentry for a while. The missionaries enrolled him in bible school, too. I think he stayed on that path for quite a while. A few years ago I heard he went back to witch doctoring again after many years away. 

I imagine Satan coming back and making him a deal some time when his luck and finances were down. He was struggling to provide for so many people in his family - something so many Haitians were simply incapable of doing due to the political and economic climate. On the one hand, he literally had Satan as a direct boss. And that boss showed up in a physical form and beat the shit out of him. On the other hand, Colo seemed also to believe  in the Christian God of the Bible. He seemed to believe that the Christian God was ultimately stronger than Satan. But in the end, God must’ve seemed uninterested or unable to provide Colo with a similar standard of living. Honestly, I don’t know what happened. I don’t even know for sure that he did go back to practicing Voodoo - so I obviously have no idea why he might’ve gone back to it. I’m just imagining God losing the battle regarding provisions in this life. That’s a battle God loses for millions of people around the world every day. Loved one’s die. People lose their jobs. Whatever it is that causes folks to insist on the cliche that God doesn’t love them or care about their situation or exist at all. It’s just interesting to me that a man that likely had a material understanding and experience with what he articulated as Good and Evil would end up going back to the dark side in order to, I assume, provide for his earthly family. 

In that sense, Colo starts to sound like any number of proverbial folks who’ve sold their soul to the devil. I guess if he actually did that, and that’s actually why did it, it’s a very honorable deal he made - to provide for his family. However, at it’s core, it’s only a more straightforward deal than any others have made - fortune, fame, longevity, these are typically desired for their ostensible ability to produce love and happiness within a community. They’re qualities that allow the deal-maker to provide for their families, whether biological or chosen. So in that general sense, Colo was just another guy who made a deal with the devil after realizing the life God provided didn’t seem good enough. He went back and forth. I have no idea what became of his experiment, but it couldn’t have been anything that hasn’t happened on earth before.

The world I inhabit isn’t geographically farther than a few hundred nautical miles, but it feels lightyears away spiritually, economically, and culturally. One common talking point while we were there, among each other, was that the spiritual was much more explicit, raw, and material than in the US. Different regions of the US have different gods - money in NY, fame in LA, power in DC, you get the idea. But even in Salem, MA during halloween (where the Witch Trials occurred in the early 1690’s; it’s now a tourism hotspot for witchcraft and the spirit world), Satan isn’t understood as a material force like he is in Haiti. 

Colo’s relationships with God and Satan were more literal than most current humans, but they didn’t necessarily play out differently, Random white people from Ohio didn’t introduce Colo to a Jesus he had never heard of. He knew the Bible well enough. I’ve gone back and forth with feeling guilty for being part of the team that upended his life and livelihood. But I also watched him escape from an entity - material or not - that abused him for listening too long to a message of freedom from his profession. A few years later, I watched friends flee from the devil lurking in the opioid crisis that hit Ohio so hard. A couple of them came to my Dad’s church a few times. More than a few of them lost their lives. Some of the ones who didn’t die ended up in jail for much worse crimes. In the US we didn’t blame Satan - we blamed the Sackler family. Sort of. Well, we’re technically in the process of assigning them blame. We’re just not sure how much cash several hundred thousand lives are worth. Unfortunately for the victims, their opioids got them very close to the local god - money. And as in any culture, it’s hard to do anything to those closest to god, whether that god be Satan or not. From that standpoint, it’s no wonder Colo decided he was best served sitting beside the most powerful local god.