Voodoo Research Paper

Cultural Background Haiti is a small country in the Caribbean located on the island of Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Currently, Haiti covers the smaller portion of the island on the west end, within the Greater Antillean island group of the West Indies. Haiti is the third largest Caribbean nation, with 9 million people spread out over 28,000 km; 2.1 million are concentrated in the capital city of Port-au-Prince (CIA, 2010). Vodoun, or “Voodoo” is the religion of the majority; “a distinctly Haitian complex of philosophical tenets, religious beliefs, and ritual practices”. Catholicism is another majority religion, inherited from the French, but “elite urbanites” prefer a strong adherence to Orthodox Christianity,
As of 2012, Haiti has 3 main sources of wealth: agriculture, industrial, and services. Nearly 60% of Haiti’s GDP comes from the service industry, directly related from Caribbean tourism (haitianpearl.org, 2012). The contribution of tourism to GDP and employment is still quite minimal: according to Intracen.org, the direct contribution of Travel and Tourism to GDP is forecast at 5.7% for 2013, up from only 1.9% in 2012. The direct contribution to employment from Travel and Tourism in 2012 was just 4.9%, taking into account indirect contributions as well (Intracen.org, 2012).
25% of Haiti’s resources come from agriculture in production of “cash” crops of sugar and coffee, and supplementing with cocoa, mangoes, and corn. FAO.org lists in order of amount produced, all of Haiti’s agricultural commodities; cash crops of sugar and coffee rank low on the production scale at numbers 10 and 13, respectively (FAO.org, 2012). This could be due the difficulty in growing these crops on such eroded land, but it does nothing to boost their economy, as sugar and coffee are their main sources of agricultural wealth (CIA,