Hannah Storm reflects on the effect the Haiti earthquake has had on the country’s religions.
We moved house again last night. I think it’s the seventh place I’ve slept in as many days, but I’m beginning to lose count.
We were invited to set up camp with the UK search and rescue team, the men and women who have been digging out survivors and, unfortunately, pulling corpses out of the rubble.
It was a humbling experience. We camped in a field near the runway, surrounded by their orange tents and teams from all over the country, from Lancashire to West Sussex, who warned us there were tarantulas.
The spiders didn’t bother us, but the night was yet again punctuated by the sounds of the aid effort, and our dawn chorus was US military aircraft and the call to prayer for Muslim rescue teams across the field.
Port-au-Prince is becoming one big camp site. Across town, at a golf club in the Delmas neighbourhood, is one of the biggest camps.
Thousands of people cluster here, under strips of cloth, bed sheets and table covers propped up with wooden stakes. A patchwork quilt of sheltered humanity, trying their best to go about life as they did before the earthquake.
So small children complain as their mothers bathe them, boys kick footballs between them, throwing up clouds of dust as they do so.
A barber shop has been set up. A man is selling sweets, rescued from his shop as his home was destroyed. Another peeps out of his new home, his toothless grin is his offer to sell me a small bottle of rum. This makeshift off licence another show of resilience in such extreme conditions.
And as a group of children gather around, calling “Bonjour blanc” or “Hello white” and we make them laugh taking photos of them and showing them our camera, a group of people begin singing. They are thanking God for being alive.
One man, who is accompanying his friends on his guitar, says religion was important to Haitians before the earthquake but it’s even more important now. It’s something I’ve noticed over again in the past few days.
Faith is almost the only thing some of these people have left. That’s spelling trouble for Haiti’s ancient voodoo religion.
Walking through the streets of the capital’s Carrefour district, we weave our way through narrow, dark, uneven streets, picking our way past people lying down to sleep outside their former homes.
And then we see her sitting there: the voodoo high priestess. A large lady, dressed in a full-length blue dress, her head wrapped in a white and red scarf with gold hoop earrings, she invites us in to her church and there, by candlelight, with a goat tethered to a post, Elina Darisme tells us about the droves abandoning voodooism.
She says she has no coffins left and she’s saddened that thousands of people have been buried in mass graves. It’s degrading, she adds, and it means a loss of contact with the dead, a serious concern in a faith so centred upon the spirit world.
Voodooism is suffering a crisis of faith with people converting after the earthquake, believing God has a purpose for them because they’ve survived.
So shocked was one of her male witches by the earthquake, he’s retraining to be a priest.
Elina invites us back, saying she’ll put on a voodoo ceremony for us. The next morning, driving through the same streets we travelled the night before, we pass buildings flattened by the destruction.
At the voodoo church, her son, the high priest, shakes his rattle to conjure up the spirits of the dead. Coloured material flutters from a balcony as children poke their heads through its balustrades.
Fairy lights wrap around a post in the middle of the room. Voodoo flags and a jesters-type hat lie on an empty coffin and men play drums with their hands and feet as Elina rocks backwards and forward.
I think about the magnitude 6.0 aftershock we have just experienced and wonder how many more people are searching for something to have faith in during these incredibly difficult times.