Tribute to Halloween

10/31/2011 02:08:00 PM sendtheroths 2 Comments

I was chatting with Alain, one of our translators who were talking about witchcraft.

He and the other translators (who were also born-again believers) were passionately telling me about how powerful the witch doctors in that part of Congo were: but that the blood of Jesus must be more powerful.

Witches on Broomsticks

He proceeded to tell me about the witchcraft of his (and many other Congolese) ancestors.

“Our ancestors used to ride around on the stick of the,” he fumbled through his vocabulary trying to find the word for…

“Broom?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “Our ancestors, especially the old women would come out at night and fly around on the stick part of the broom.”

I was totally taken aback. “Seriously?”

Alain had no knowledge of the décor Americans spend millions of dollars to adorn their homes with and cover their bodies with. When I told him about Halloween, he looked at me like I was crazy.

In his Congolese sort of way, he was looking right back at me saying, “Seriously?”

Spells

In Congo, when a witchdoctor puts a curse on you. There’s something to worry about. Witchdoctors are generally paid based on the results of their work. Whether it is a healing, a curse, a spell for a new job or better crops.

Witchdoctors are paid based on their RESULTS. This means that what they do actually works.  

Have you ever seen a zombie?

Try this—A few days ago in Congo, eight women were gang-raped in broad daylight on a ferry by 22-armed soldiers.

"Those women had been terrorized, they had bodily injuries on them," the witness recalled. "Some of them had no clothes on, they were naked."

"The militia took off their [women's] underwear and bras and they opened their zips. As soon as one person would finish, he would get up and another person would come and sleep with that very same woman," recounted Mr. Ossibouyen.

He said a group comprising of between 25 and 30 soldiers arrived at the base with an estimated eight to 12 "young and elderly women" who they then raped.

"One girl was calling out for her father: 'Papa, papa where are you?' Another: 'I am dead'," recalled the witness. Read the full article on allAfrica.com

 

Wanna talk blood and gore?

Try and talk to a women who has been raped up to ten times a day for months and has now reached a point where her entrails are coming out.

Try talking to a kid who saw his parents cut to pieces in front of him and thrown into what we would know as a "witch's cauldron” full of boiling water.

Try seeing your kid’s head chopped off and put on top of a stake which is driven into the ground, for all the village to see.

Kind of like this nice little decoration -->

Happy Halloween

We [Americans] write off witchcraft, zombies, blood, gore and evil spirits. We somehow think that saying that ‘it’s for fun’ will bring a kind of justification to the matter.

Our logic tends to believe that, because my child is not ACTUALLY bleeding to death, I can smother his/her face in fake blood and call it fun.

Since my child is well-fed and not a human bone-bag, I can just dress him up like some skeleton looking thing and send him off to have ‘fun.’

Do your kid a favor and on Halloween have them take a look at what head on a stake really, looks like. What a bone-bag really looks like and what dead bodies lining up a community really looks like. Why not? It’s just all for fun, isn’t it?

I must say. With our work ethic, degrees up the wazoo and ‘America is a beacon of hope’ kind of attitude we have… Our logic is really off.

Happy Halloween!