From The Field
4-30-2010
Sakenville, Haiti
The more time we spend in Sakenville, the more we see and understand what we believe hell is like. I don't at all mean to say that Sakenville is like hell. On the contrary, we are so thankful to live here, and have found ourselves to be so surrounded by sacrificial, joyful and loving friends. Sakenville is a beautiful place in so many ways because of the brilliant flickers of light here and there, and because of the many ways this community has made us welcome.
What I mean is that we are beginning to understand darkness in a way that we never did before. Sakenville is a community known throughout Haiti for its Voodoo. In fact, our night watchman, now our brother in Christ, moved to Sakenville with a few of his friends four years ago from Port-au-Prince because of it's mighty voodoo reputation.
However, the more time we spend outside these seminary walls, the more we are aware of this: It is NOT the darkness of Satan that we overwhelmingly feel. It is only the darkness that comes with the absence of God.
I spent about an hour this afternoon with a woman two years younger than me, Angeline. Her son is exactly one month older than Lily, and we talked while we finished scrubbing their laundry. She has a joyful spirit. She is gorgeous, with wide-set eyes, a flawless complexion, twisty braids rooting out in every direction. She is ridiculously kind to me, patient with Lily, anxious for friendship, quick to share and to listen. The father of her son lives with her, and he, too, is such a likeable man, hard-working, dark as the Haitian earth, eyes full of laughter.
There is a sense of pleasantness in Angeline's yard. But there is no light. She has her son. She has her boyfriend. She has some clothes, some food, a dry place to sleep. But she has not HIM, and her soul, her eyes, her home, her speech, her spirit...cry out to me that truth every time I see her. Darkness is all I see when I return her beautiful smile. That is what hell is...the absence of Him. She is choosing it here on earth.
Sometimes, this is what darkness looks like.
While I sat with Angeline, and then later with a large group of ladies a few more houses down, Matt and 8 of the students headed further down the road. They hadn't planned on going to the primary voodoo temple in Sakenville today, and actually quite stumbled upon it.
Matt had spoken to the pastor in Sakenville a few weeks ago about the extreme voodoo presence in this community, and Janiel had named one boko
(witchdoctor) as the head of voodoo in Sakenville.
"Pierre is a very large man, good color (translation: lighter brown skin), young, and he is known as the most powerful boko of all the bokos in Sakenville," Janiel had said. "If Pierre came to Christ (this is how Janiel thinks, always) OH, oh what a change we would see in Sakenville."
Stacey Ayars
