Haitian Culture: Death and Dying

Haitian Culture: Death and Dying From one of the poorest countries in the world comes one of the most complex and varied religions. Although very different from much of the world, Haitian customs regarding end of life, funeral practices, the dead and the practice of Voodoo has evolved throughout the past several centuries. From the very beginnings of the Island to the present the Haitian people have practiced their own variance of religion unlike any other place in the world. I have been to Haiti many times with my church and find it absolutely heartbreaking. Poverty and lack of any significant healthcare system aided and fueled by a corrupt government begets one of most broken societies in the western world. The last time I was there was the first time in recent history that Voodoo wasnt the national religion. Haiti has always claimed Roman Catholicism officially but until very recently most Haitians practiced voodoo alongside it with no sense of contrast between the two. Although the culture is split between Christianity and Voodoo, most churches dont turn people away who need care if they can provide it. By the same token, those who practice Voodoo do not shy away from health centers in favor of only being treated by the Voodoo priest or witch doctor. However, most hospitals are in the city so for rural Haitians seeing a voodoo healer is the only option. While in our compound in Borel (a rural town about 100 miles north of Port a prince) I could hear the drums of the voodoo ceremonies from beyond our walls, and more than once have seen the Christian funeral processions in the streets. I remember watching the vigils of the folks sitting in the cemeteries and asking my interpreter guide about what was going on at night and about the rituals and about how and why they worked the way they do. In order to accomplish this we must first do our best to understand a little of how Haiti came to exist Haiti is best known to be discovered by Christopher Columbus, but there were many cultures that inhabited the land before his arrival in 1492. The first known settlers were the Ciboneys, who migrated from what is now known as North America in 450 A.D. Then in 900 A.D., the Tainos, who belonged to the Arawak nation, settled in large villages. The Arawak Indians called the land Ayiti, which means land of mountains. Columbus left Spaniards in charge of the land and they became responsible of almost terminating all of the Arawaks This caused the island to be empty for many years until the French colonized the land in the middle of seventeenth century. During Frances reign, Haiti became one of the most prominent countries in the world. Resources such as sugar cane, cotton, cocoa, and coffee became the most important sources to Haitis wealth. These resources became a high demand by European markets and because of the increase in demand, the French needed cheap labor. As other countries did , the French looked towards Africa for slaves and since the slaves were not treated fairly, they soon became Frances downfall. It was during this time that the catholic French began converting the slaves who also held on to their ancient voodoo religion but practiced in secret. Eventually the two became intertwined. The slaves became the most important thing to Haitis economy and future and in the year of 1791, the slaves planned a revolt against the French and became successful. In 1804, the slaves took over Napoleons reign and Haiti became the first independent black nation headed by General Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Dessalines was a poor leader and upon his death the country was split into two, making Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Today, the population is over 5 million and especially after the earthquake is excessively poor and very urbanized. It has constantly struggled economically after winning its independence, has not found an answer to the enormous poverty problems and is highly reliant on aid from other countries. Without a stable government or means of supporting itself Haiti remains at the bottom of economic and political power. The people of Haiti are mainly of African origin and speak either Haitian Creole (a unique dialect of French) or French and are Roman Catholic and Protestant or voodoo worshippers. Voodoo has been the best known feature of Haiti and has gained an image (mostly from Hollywood horror films) of being a country of sorcery and zombies. The religion of voodoo is monotheistic religion in which there a certain classes of spirits and lesser gods all subservient of the one true God. One of the main functions of these lesser gods or Lwa/loah cause or cure illness. Most all of the voodoo ritual is centered upon this one function and is taken as science for most the people of Haiti. Virtually all of the modern medicine practiced in Haiti is centered around the cities and therefore rural Haitians will almost always consult a healer practicing voodoo. The roots of voodoo run deep as does Christianity. None of us would find it strange to find healing through our faith and so it goes for the Haitians. A healer may use such things as putting a knife under a bed to cut pain or tie knot in string to choke out swelling. If the patient suffers from pain he may believe that a spell has been put on him or a curse. If the pain is imagined from the knowledge of someone placing the curse on him the spell to remove it may be just as effe ctive. This where the dolls of the movies come into play. A pin in the head of the doll is meant to relieve the pain not cause it, and a Haitian who believes this process may believe he is healed as a result of the ceremony. Those who practice voodoo do not believe that death is the end of life. Followers of Voodoo believe that each person has a soul and that it contains both the a part of the person and a part of the larger universe When someone dies, the soul stays close to the deceased for seven to nine days. During this time the soul can be captured and used by an evil one and made into a zombie to be enslaved to serve the one who made him. As long as the soul is not captured, a ritual called Nine Night is performed in order to completely release the soul from the body so the soul may live in the dark waters for a period of a year and a day. If this is not done correctly, the soul may have to wander the earth and do harm to others. After three hundred and sixty six days, loved ones of the deceased can initiate the Rite of Reclamation to raise the deceased persons soul essence from the dark waters and put it in a clay jar known as a govi. The clay jar may be placed in a temple or on an altar where the family may come and offer gifts and feed it offer it drink and pay homage to it. and At this time the spirit of the deceased is welcomed to enter a loved one and give them any last words of enlightenment. Sometimes the jar is then broken and the pieces dropped at a crossroads. This completes the purpose of the ritual which is to release the spirit until the final incarnation. In keeping with addressing t The four primary dimensions of coping with dying the physical psychological social and spiritual I will list some other common practices Haitians use in their culture when dealing with those at the end of life. When death is certain, the family will come together and bring with them religious artifacts. They will go to great expense and extremes to be together as it so important to be present if possible at the time of death.. Once they are together they will cry and pray. It is preferable for most Haitians that they die at home surrounded by loved ones. However, hospital deaths are not out of the question. At the moment of death there is ritual wailing and final bath is given. In Haiti the eldest family member takes charge of the funeral arrangements, but the body is kept until everyone can make it home for the funeral. Funerals are extremely signifigant social events and last for several days in which rum is consumed and large amounts of food.during this time family will sleep at the house and friends will stay in the yard. Since most Haitians are reluctant to be buried under ground elaborate multi-chambered tombs are bought which will contain several members or entire families. Since the body must be intact for resurrection at the end of days no organ donations are permitted. Since voodoo lacks any real theology many variations exist. Regional and cultural differences make doing solid research elusive and sparse as what is practiced in one place may or may not be practiced in another. Common beliefs about the afterlife are that there is no reward or punishment there. Spirits can enter or mount a body. At that time the person will not share the same space and becomes possessed by the Loa. Priest both summon and help the spirit leave a body. Drums, dance, and sacrifice are part of all voodoo ritual. In conclusion, Haitians have one of the shortest life expectancies on earth (61 years for adult males), so Haitians are used to living with pain, sickness and death. They are basically a peace loving people seeking hope in a land that that doesnt offer much. Like my own religion and culture the people of Haiti bond by practicing the religion and culture of their parents and ancestors. What some of us find superstitious, exotic and strange when looked at more closely is not so different at all. Practicing religion and doing it as a family and a community brings us closer to an understanding of purpose and meaning whether it is true or not. Without tradition and ritual we have much less in common and much less of a reason to carry on. Purpose to pass on to the next generation keeps going and going strong. Perhaps that is why the modern Haitians continue to exist today.

Literature of Knowledge Essay

First printed in The North Briton Review, August, 1848, as part of a review of The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. W. Roscoe, 1847. What is it that we mean by literature? Popularly, and amongst the thoughtless, it is held to include everything that is printed in a book. Little logic is required to disturb that definition. The most thoughtless person is easily made aware that in the idea of literature one essential element is, ? some relation to a general and common interest of man, so that what applies only to a local or professional or merely personal interest, even though presenting itself in the shape of a book, will not belong to literature. So far the definition is easily narrowed; and it is as easily expanded. For not only is much that takes a station in books not literature, but, inversely, much that really is literature never reaches a station in books. The weekly sermons of Christendom, that vast pulpit literature which acts so extensively upon the popular mind? to warn, to uphold, to renew, to comfort, to alarm? does not attain the sanctuary of libraries In the ten-thousandth part of its extent. The drama as for instance the finest of Shakespeare’s plays in England and all leading Athenian plays in the noontide of the Attic stage, operated as a literature on the public mind, and were (according to the strictest letter of that term) published through the audiences that witnessed their representation, some time before they were published as things to be read: and they were published in this scenical mode of publication with much more effect than they could have had as books during ages of costly copying or of costly printing. Books, therefore, do not suggest an idea co-extensive and interchangeable with the idea of literature, since much literature, scenic, forensic, or didactic (as from lectures and public orators), may never come into books, and much that does come into books may connect itself with no literary interest. But a far more important correction, applicable to the common vague idea of literature, is to be sought, not so much in a better definition of literature, as in a sharper distinction of the two functions which it fulfils. In that great social organ which, collectively, we call  literature, there may be distinguished two separate offices, that may blend and often do so, but capable, severally, of a severe insulation, and naturally fitted for reciprocal repulsion. There is, first, the literature of knowledge, and secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach; the function of the second is to move: the first is a rudder; the second an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding, or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy. Remotely it may travel towards an object seated in what Lord Bacon calls dry light; but proximately it does and must operate? else it ceases to be a literature of power-on and through that humid light which clothes itself in the mists and glittering iris of human passions, desires, and genial emotions. Men have so little reflected on the higher functions of literature as to find it a paradox if one should describe it as a mean or subordinate purpose of books to give information. But this is a paradox only in the sense which makes it honorable to be paradoxical. Whenever we talk in ordinary language of seeking information or gaining knowledge, we understand the words as connected with something of absolute novelty. But it is the grandeur of all truth which can occupy a very high place in human interests that it is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds: it exists eternally, by way of germ or latent principle, in the lowest as in the highest, needing to be developed but never to be planted. To be capable of transplantation is the immediate criterion of a truth that ranges on a lower scale. Besides which, there is a rarer thing than truth, namely, power, or deep sympathy with truth. What is the effect, for instance, upon society, of children? By the pity, by the tenderness, and by the peculiar modes of admiration, which connect themselves with the helplessness, with the innocence, and with the simplicity of children, not only are the primal affections strengthened and continually renewed, but the qualities which are dearest in the sight of heaven-the frailty, for instance, which appeals to forbearance, the innocence which symbolizes the heavenly, and the simplicity which is most alien from the worldly-are kept up in perpetual remembrance, and their ideals are continually refreshed. A purpose of the same nature is answered by the higher literature, viz. , the literature of power. What do you learn from Paradise Lost? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery-book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery-book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power, that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upwards, a step ascending as upon a Jacob’s ladders from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry you further on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth; whereas the very first step in power is a flight, is an ascending movement into another element where earth is forgotten. Were it not that human sensibilities are ventilated and continually called out into exercise by the great phenomena of infancy, or of real life as it moves through chance and change, or of literature as it recombines these elements in the mimicries of poetry, romance, etc., it is certain that, like any animal power or muscular energy falling into disuse, all such sensibilities would gradually droop and dwindle. It is in relation to these great moral capacities of man that the literature of power, as contradistinguished from that of knowledge, lives and has its field of action. It is concerned with what is highest in man; for the Scriptures themselves never condescended to deal by suggestion or cooperation with the mere discursive understanding: when speaking of man in his intellectual capacity, the Scriptures speak not of the understanding, but of â€Å"the understanding heart, â€Å"?  making the heart, i. e. , the great intuitive (or non-discursive) organ, to be the interchangeable formula for man in his highest state of capacity for the infinite. Tragedy, romance, fairy tale, or epopee, all alike restore to man’s mind the ideals of justice, of hope, of truth, of mercy, of retribution, which else (left to the support of daily life in its realities) would languish for want of sufficient illustration. What is meant, for instance, by poetic justice? ?It does not mean a justice that differs by its object from the ordinary justice of human jurisprudence; for then it must be confessedly a very bad kind of justice; but it means a justice that differs, from common forensic justice by the degree in which it attains its object, a justice that is more omnipotent over its own ends, as dealing? not with the refractory elements of earthly life, but with the elements of its own creation, and with materials flexible to its own purest preconceptions. It is certain that, were it not for the Literature of Power, these ideals would often remain amongst us as mere arid notional forms; whereas, by the creative forces of man put forth in literature, they gain a vernal life of restoration, and germinate into vital activities. The commonest novel, by moving in alliance with human fears and hopes, with human instincts of wrong and right, sustains and quickens those affections. Calling them into action, it rescues them. from torpor. And hence the preeminency, over all authors that merely teach of the meanest that moves, or that teaches, if at all, indirectly by moving. The very highest work that has ever existed in the literature of Knowledge is but a provisional work: a book upon trial and sufferance, and quamdiu bene se gesserit. Let its teaching be even partially revised, let it be but expanded, ? nay, even let its teaching be but placed in a better order, ? and instantly it is superseded. Whereas the feeblest works in the Literature of Power, surviving at all, survive as finished and unalterable amongst men. For instance, the Principia of Sir Isaac Newton was a book militant on earth from the first. In all stages of its progress it would have to fight for its existence: 1st as regards absolute truth; idly, when that combat was over, as regards its form or mode of presenting the truth. And as soon as a La Place, or anybody else, builds higher upon the foundations laid by this book, effectually he throws it out of the sunshine into decay and darkness; by weapons won from this book he superannuates and destroys this book, so that soon the name of Newton remains as a mere nominis umbra,† but his book, as a living power, has transmigrated into other forms. Now, on the contrary, the iliad, the Prometheus of Aeschylus, the Othello or King Lear, the Hamlet or Macbeth, and the Paradise Lost are not militant but triumphant forever as long as the languages exist in which they speak or can be taught to speak. They never can transmigrate into new incarnations. To reproduce these in new forms, or variations, even if in some things they should be improved, would be to plagiarize. A good steam engine is properly superseded by a better. But one lovely pastoral valley is not superseded by another, nor a statue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michael Angelo. These things are separated not by  imparity, but by disparity. They are not thought of as unequal under the same standard, but as different in kind, and, if otherwise equal, as equal under a different standard. Human works of immortal beauty and works of nature in one respect stand on the same footing: they never absolutely repeat each other, never approach so near as not to differ; and they differ not as better and worse, or simply by more and less: they differ by undecipherable and incommunicable differences, that cannot be caught by mimicries, that cannot be reflected in the mirror of copies, that cannot become ponderable in the scales of vulgar comparison.

Evaluating The Suitability Of Solar Powered Led Lighting...

C.K.K. Sekyere, F.K. Forson, F.O. Akuffo, â€Å"Technical and economic studies on lighting systems: A case for LED lanterns and CFLs in rural Ghana†. Published On 2012. In this study is designed to assess the suitability of solar-powered LED and CFL lighting systems as replacement for kerosene lanterns. The Ghana 22,900,927 population are using kerosene as fuel for the sources of lighting purpose. They are nearly 75.6 % of rural population and 19.9 % of the urban population are use kerosene as fuel for lighting purpose. As he conducted survey among the 113 non – electric households in 16 rural communities in that six regions or located in Ghana that use kerosene lanterns he was observed the 69 % of the households established the kerosene lanterns in the morning. He was done the technical analysis measuring the each lighting system on flat surface measuring 1 m by 1.2 m using a portable lux meter. In this analysis he is observed the within two years, he will save lot of money after using solar led and cell systems Therefore, the most significant deduction from the study is that the solar-powered LED and CFL lighting systems are a viable and cost effective off-grid lighting alternative for fuel-based lighting systems in rural Ghana. Biswajit Biswas, Sujoy Mukherjee, â€Å"A comparative study of low cost solar based lighting system and fuel based lighting system for remote off grid location in India† Published on Sep-Oct 2013, Energy is the integral part of life. Energy demand

Essay about CyberCrime and Terrorism - 1088 Words

Throughout the years, there has been a steady increase in the amount of cyber crime committed. Technology is a constantly changing entity, constantly evolving, always progressing. Naturally this can make it hard to stay on top of things. In turn, law enforcement runs into various issues regarding cyber crime and cyber terrorism. Cyber crime and terrorism is so complex of a crime that it can be hard to break down the barriers that can lead to justifying the action. Major issues that are prominent in cyber crime and terrorism are that laws vary greatly from country to country. There is also a major lack of knowledge and equipment in many departments as well as training. On top of these major issues, there are also issues with reporting these†¦show more content†¦The fact that cyber crime can be committed from half way across the world is a huge burden on those whose job it is to apprehend the criminals. The main problem that springs up, is the sheer fact that not every country has the same laws. One country may not have the same definition of cyber crime as the United States, or even recognize the act as a criminal offense. This can cause major issues when the countries laws differ, or even if the criminal is inside an unfriendly territory. This makes the process of apprehending a criminal extremely difficult and time consuming. Countries may often refuse to extradite criminals when this occurs; causing a standstill in the apprehension progress, and once this occurs, the solution must be purely diplomatic, and can be a long process. In addition to the major issue of distance, there is also an issue that is much more of an internal problem. Since much of this technology is relatively new in the scheme of things, many of the law enforcement departments have a major lack of knowledge, equipment and training to deal with cyber crime and cyber terrorism. 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