Vallee de Jacmel

November 1 and 2 are a holiday in Haiti. It’s the serious equivalent of Halloween in which the dead are respected and the spirits are feared. We learned about it quite late so we didn’t have any special plans until the school building contractor (and also a friend) invited us to join him and his friends for a couple of days in the mountains above Jacmel. The holiday turned out to be a nice and much needed vacation. Vallee de Jacmel is a green quiet mountain area with a lot of trees and a calm community.

The Valley

The Village

The shore city of Jacmel is a center for art workshops and exhibitions in Haiti…. And there is also a sandy beach.

Art

In the evening in Jacmel before sitting down at a very nice bar for a drink, we got to see a small part of the Gede holiday spirit. Basically it’s a holiday in which voodoo ceremonies are combined with street parades and “sexual” dancing. There are ceremonies at the cemeteries. Most people we talked to claimed that in most areas the holiday lost some of its meaning by becoming a dancing parade instead of the ‘real thing’ (what ever that was). That actually sounds familiar as it happens in Israel and the US too (US Memorial Day is only one very trivial example).

Gede: it's a little hard to see but these men have white paint
on their faces and are dancing in the street.

Nice Jacmel bar