GANTHIER, HAITI � Arms raised to the heavens, tens of thousands of Haitians flocked to a craggy hillside to pray and seek renewal in one of the spiritually steeped country’s biggest annual pilgrimages � one of many exuberant expressions of Good Friday devotion across the Americas.
At a hilltop crucifix, some raised passports to heaven, pleading for visas, or dog-eared photos of sick relatives. Others prayed for a loving relationship or a steady job.
Some at the ritual site in tiny Ganthier marched along a steep, dusty trail with rocks balanced on their heads. When they reached a precipice, they stood at the edge and hurled the stones to symbolically cast away sins.
“I have too much misery, too many problems. I am praying for my deliverance,” said Martin Normile, a long-unemployed father of two teenage children, as he walked slowly with a large stone on his head.
Delano Demosthenes, a teacher from the town of Carrefour, was among those praying for calm when a U.N. stabilization mission concludes in mid-October. The pilgrimage comes a day after the U.N. Security Council voted to end a stabilization operation in Haiti after 13 years, replacing it with a smaller mission with police and civilian peacekeepers for an initial period of six months.
“I am praying for a stable, peaceful Haiti. I am worried that when the U.N. leaves there’s going to be trouble here,” he said at one of the white crosses that line the hillside path.
The Good Friday ritual mixes elements of Catholic ceremonies with Voodoo, or Vodou as preferred by Haitians, a religion that evolved in the 17th century when colonists brought slaves to Haiti from West Africa.
Hundreds of thousands of people across Latin America turned out to participate in or attend reenactments of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, with perhaps the largest in the working class Mexico City borough of Ixtapalapa. In southern Mexico, human rights groups organized a stations-of-the-cross procession of migrants to demand better treatment.
One of the most unique was in the Bolivian community of Arenal de Cochiraya, where people created images of the Passion of Christ in sculptures made of sand.
Thousands of candles lit the ceremony in the Paraguayan farm community of Tanarandy.
Source: Voice of America