They're Back! Those Wonderful Church Bulletins! Thank God for church ladies with typewriters. These sentences actually appeared in church bulletins or were announced in church services (Summer, 2007 Release).
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The Fasting & Prayer Conference includes meals.
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The sermon this morning: 'Jesus Walks on Water.' The sermon tonight: 'Searching for Jesus.'
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Our youth basketball team is back in action Wednesday at 8 PM in the recreation hall. Come out and watch us kill Christ the King.
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Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Bring your husbands.
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The peacemaking meeting scheduled for today has been canceled due to a conflict.
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Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our community. Smile at someone who is hard to love. Say 'Hell' to someone who doesn't care much about you.
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Don't let worry kill you off - let the Church help.
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Miss Charlene Mason sang 'I will not pass this way again,' giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.
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For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery downstairs.
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Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir They need all the help they ca n get.
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The Rector will preach his farewell message after which the choir will sing: 'Break Forth Into Joy.'
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Irving Benson and Jessie Carter were married on October 24 in the church. So ends a friendship that began in their school days.
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A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow.
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At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be 'What Is Hell?' Come early and listen to our choir practice.
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Eight new choir robes are currently needed due to the addition of several new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.
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Scouts are saving aluminum cans, bottles and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.
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Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person you want remembered.
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The church will host an evening of fine dining, super entertainment and gracious hostility.
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Potluck supper Sunday at 5:00 PM - prayer and medication to follow.
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This evening at 7 PM there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.
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Ladies Bible Study will be held Thur sd ay morning at 10 AM. All ladies are invited to lunch in the Fellowship Hall after the B. S. Is done.
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Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 PM. Please use the back door.
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The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare's Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 PM. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.
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Weight Watchers will meet at 7 PM at the First Presbyterian Church. Please use large double door at the side entrance.
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The Associate Minister unveiled the church's new tithing campaign slogan Last Sun day : 'I Upped My Pledge - Up Yours
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Did you know?
Haiti (English pronounced /ˈheɪtiː/; French Haïti pronounced [aiti]; Haitian Creole: Ayiti), officially the Republic of Haiti (République d'Haïti ; Repiblik d Ayiti), is a French and Creole speaking Latin American country located on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic, in the Greater Antilles archipelago. Ayiti (Land of Mountains) was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island. The country's highest point is Pic la Selle, at 2,680 metres (8,793 ft). The total area of Haiti is 27,750 square kilometres (10,714 sq mi) and its capital is Port-au-Prince.
Derivation of the name of the country
The name Haiti comes from the Taino word for the entire island of Hispaniola, Ayiti, Quisqueya or Bohio which means "Mountainous Land". The French staked their claim on the entire island based on the settlement of Tortuga and Gonave Islands by French pirates in the 15th and 16th centuries. The colony was officially incorporated by France in the early 1600s. By 1697, with the signing of the Treaty of Ryswick with Spain, the French took the western third of the island, which they named Saint-Domingue (a gallicization of the Spanish name, Santo Domingo ("Saint Dominic"). During this French colonial period, the colony earned the name “La Perle des Antilles” ("The Pearl of the Antilles") due to its economic prosperity and importance. The Spanish kept control of Santo Domingo on the eastern two-thirds of the island.
With the declaration of Saint-Domingue's independence from France on January 1, 1804, following the Haitian Revolution, Revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines restored the original Taino name as a symbolic gesture of honor to the Taino people and as defiance against European rule.
Now you know!
Haitian Currency! What it looks like!
The Gourde (HTG) is the official currency of Haiti. The gourde can be further subdivided into 100 centimes.
The gourde was formerly pegged to the US dollar at a rate of 5 gourdes to one US dollar. Since then, however, the gourde has been placed on a floating rate. In light of the former peg, five gourdes are often referred to as a "Haitian dollar." Five centimes, in similar nature, is referred to as a "Haitian penny." In select regions of Haiti, prices are denoted in Haitian dollars rather than gourdes and customers are left to multiply the dollars by five.
Haitian Coins - 1895
One gourde (Papa Doc) Papa Doc Duvalier Overprint
At the end of the Baby Doc Duvalier regime the one and two gourde note were over printed with a red circle and slash across it with the date of the end of the Duvalier regime—February 7, 1986—printed below in red [right>]. The overprint was placed over the image of Baby Doc on the 5 gourde note and his father the infamous Papa Doc, François Duvalier.
Subsequent notes were replaced with images of figures from the history of the Haitian Republic.
Source: http://www.travelinghaiti.com/haitian-currency.asp, http://www.gocurrency.com/countries/haiti.htm
The gourde was formerly pegged to the US dollar at a rate of 5 gourdes to one US dollar. Since then, however, the gourde has been placed on a floating rate. In light of the former peg, five gourdes are often referred to as a "Haitian dollar." Five centimes, in similar nature, is referred to as a "Haitian penny." In select regions of Haiti, prices are denoted in Haitian dollars rather than gourdes and customers are left to multiply the dollars by five.
Haitian Coins - 1895
One gourde (Papa Doc) Papa Doc Duvalier Overprint
At the end of the Baby Doc Duvalier regime the one and two gourde note were over printed with a red circle and slash across it with the date of the end of the Duvalier regime—February 7, 1986—printed below in red [right>]. The overprint was placed over the image of Baby Doc on the 5 gourde note and his father the infamous Papa Doc, François Duvalier.
Subsequent notes were replaced with images of figures from the history of the Haitian Republic.
Source: http://www.travelinghaiti.com/haitian-currency.asp, http://www.gocurrency.com/countries/haiti.htm
Haiti Cherie a song by Jacques Sauveur Jean
Hope you guys enjoy this music! The style is called Kompa. I will talk about our music style in a later post.
Revolution, Independence, and the New Year
Haiti's Soup Joumou
(e-SoupSong 32: December 1, 2002)
ONCE UPON A TIME, the people of Haiti had special cause to celebrate on New Year's Day. It was January 1, 1804, and after a savage 13-year struggle against their French masters, they had at last achieved independence.
What better way to celebrate than with the very soup they had been forbidden as slaves to eat? Ahhh, soup made from joumou, the delicious and aromatic pumpkin, so different from their usual daily allotment of precisely one ounce of salted meat or fish and one bottle of lemonade. During the independence celebration that happy day, so the story goes, a huge kettle of pumpkin soup was made in the city of Gonaïves, and everyone present was served a bowl. Why? A special communion to forever forge the bonds of brotherhood and commit to a bright national future.
I wish it had been that easy.
Haiti: that "pearl of the Antilles"; that "only successful slave uprising in the history of the world"; that "eldest daughter of France and Africa" that rejected its European heritage--it hasn't been an easy road. In fact, it's been said that far more blood has spilled there than sweat, and there's no counting the buckets of sweat that were shed by 700,000 slaves over 100 years on some 7,000 sugar, coffee, cocoa, cotton, and indigo plantations.
What nation today is routinely excluded from travel guides on the Caribbean? Haiti.
What nation has the lowest literacy rate in the Americas? Haiti.
What people, caught in the crosshairs of historical karma and environmental disaster, have the lowest daily calorie intake in the western hemisphere? Haitians.
From the time King Ferdinand of Spain congratulated Columbus on his Christmas day landfall near Cap Haïtien then declared open season on West Africans for his New World sugar plantations there, Haiti has been a land of warm and gracious people racked by violence and suffering.
Here's some history behind that heavily symbolic kettle of new year's soup: After the 1492 landfall, Spain stayed long enough to kill off the native Arawaks with Old World diseases, import sugar cane cuttings from the Canary Islands, and establish plantations with African slaves...but then left Haiti to the French in 1697 (Peace of Ryswyck) when she found easier pickings elsewhere in the New World.
France wasted no time. Under Kings Louis XIV, XV, and XVI, she transformed those depopulated mountains and valleys into cash crop factories of sugar, indigo, and cotton. How? With 2,500 African slaves in 1698...that jumped to 10,000 in 3 years...and to over 500,000 by 1791--culled largely from tribes in Congo, Angola, Dahomey, Guinea, and Senegal. Their treatment was so horrific, so inhuman, that I haven't the heart to tell. They died like flies and had to be constantly replaced by new shipments from Africa.
So what happened in 1789 when the French people rose up and proclaimed Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!? After all, the French National Assembly's Declaration of the Rights of Man clearly stated, "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights."
Oh, well. Ahem. National Assemblymen in Paris said, oh yes, we guess that means Haiti too...or at least the freed mulattoes there, those fine sons of Frenchmen and their African slaves. No way, said the racist colonialists in Haiti--and they conducted such a tough lobby that the National Assembly reversed itself in 1791.
Haiti's mulattoes could not believe their ears. It was the last straw. They immediately joined their education, knowledge, and considerable military experience to those 500,000 enslaved Africans--and Haiti exploded in revolt. In August 1791, Vodou priest Boukman Duffy convened slave rebel leaders in the forest overlooking Le Cap. Illuminated by flashes of lightening, they made incantations...they slit the throat of a pig and drank its blood...and they formally swore death to all blancs, which they carried out to the letter with pruning hooks, machetes, and fire. In November, Louis-Jacques Bauvais' mulatto troops attacked and burned Port-au-Prince, slaughtering whites wherever they found them. They sported white ears as cockades in their caps and committed atrocities against women and children I just don't have the heart to tell.
And that was just the start.
Great leaders arose to lead the revolution. Ill-fated Toussaint L'Ouverture, who died in a French prison lamented by poet Wordsworth: "Thy friends are exultations, agonies/And love, and man's unconquerable mind." Henri Christophe. Jean-Jacques Dessalines. And these former slaves led their people first against their colonial masters, in the name of the French Republic. Then against Spain and England, who pounced, chops slavering, when they saw the Pearl of the Antilles slipping from French hands. Then, finally, against France herself, when First Consul Napoleon sent brother-in-law Leclerc and 55,000 crack officers and men instructed to, as he confided to foreign minister Talleyrand, annihilate the government of blacks in Haiti and restore slavery at the first opportunity. "Rid us of these gilded Africans," Napoleon later said, "and we shall have nothing more to wish."
Thirteen long years, all told, of tit-for-tat torched cities, slit throats, scorched earth, attacks, betrayals, mass executions, sieges, torture, encirclements, and despair, not to mention 10,000 deaths from malaria and yellow fever. Dessalines' ultimate winning strategy: koupe tèt, boule kay, cut off the heads, burn down. In the end, some 300,000 Haitians died and 50,000 French--and in the end, the French were defeated. General Rochambeau was given 10 days to pack up his army and ship home.
Which brings us back, harrowed, to the dawn of 1804 and that kettle of soup joumou.
When the last French ship had cleared Le Cap, Dessalines sent word to Gérin at Les Cayes: "There is no more doubt, mon cher général, the country is ours, and the famous who-shall-have-it is settled." In Gonaïves, he divided up the war chest--8 gourdes per man; he dispersed his army to the principal towns; and he sat down with his generals "to ratify in ink what they had written in blood."
On January 1, 1804, people started gathering at dawn at Gonaïves' Place d'Armes. Dessalines mounted the Autel de la Patrie to speak. He recited the cruelties of their enslavement in Kreyol, so everyone could understand him, and he declared that Haitians would forever after live free and die free. "Long live independence!" he shouted at the end of the ceremony, having no idea what a difficult life it would be. Cannons were fired; church bells, rung; people cheered; and, they say, kettles of fragrant soup joumou perfumed the air, ready to be ladled up in a mass communion.
It's a great image. No wonder this soup has become the touchstone of Haiti's fervent wish for peace and freedom--its symbol of communion and brotherhood--a beacon that shines through today's dark days of poverty and continuing political strife. One thing is sure, on January 1, Haitians around the world make it and eat it and share it precisely to remember the past and to hope for the future.
Oh, and there are lots of other stories about soup joumou too. Some say, pure and simple, it's a good luck charm for the new year--and you better eat it cause it's bad luck if you don't. Others say, no, it's really to cleanse and purify the body for the new year...and don't eat anything else til midnight, when you can eat an orange and count your luck in the coming year by its number of seeds. Others yet say it honors the Vodou god Papa Loko, keeper of African spiritual traditions, and that it reliably "lifts up a man's soul and makes him prophesy."
There's something to that last comment. This is a fabulous stuffed soup--bright yellow-orange and sensuously African with an opulence of meat, vegetables, and the Caribbean bite of lime and chilis. In Kreyol, you'd say it was stuffed with vyann, joumou, kawot, seleri, zanyon, nave, pomdete, malanga, and shou...and spiced with piman bouk, ten, lay, and sitwon.
Pat Solley
Resources: Alix's Corner at Discover Haiti website, Madison Smartt Bell's All Soul's Rising, Roseline Ng Cheong-Lom's Haiti, Devra Dedeaux' Sugar Reef Caribbean Cookbook, James Ferguson's Traveler's Literary Companion to the Caribbean, Robert and Nancy Heinl's Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492-1971, National Assembly of France's "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen," 8/26/1789, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories, Mirta Yurnet-Thomas' A Taste of Haiti, William Wordsworth's Collected Poetry, and an assortment of encyclopedias, articles, and websites.
this article is available in its entirety at: http://www.soupsong.com/zdec02.html
(e-SoupSong 32: December 1, 2002)
ONCE UPON A TIME, the people of Haiti had special cause to celebrate on New Year's Day. It was January 1, 1804, and after a savage 13-year struggle against their French masters, they had at last achieved independence.
What better way to celebrate than with the very soup they had been forbidden as slaves to eat? Ahhh, soup made from joumou, the delicious and aromatic pumpkin, so different from their usual daily allotment of precisely one ounce of salted meat or fish and one bottle of lemonade. During the independence celebration that happy day, so the story goes, a huge kettle of pumpkin soup was made in the city of Gonaïves, and everyone present was served a bowl. Why? A special communion to forever forge the bonds of brotherhood and commit to a bright national future.
I wish it had been that easy.
Haiti: that "pearl of the Antilles"; that "only successful slave uprising in the history of the world"; that "eldest daughter of France and Africa" that rejected its European heritage--it hasn't been an easy road. In fact, it's been said that far more blood has spilled there than sweat, and there's no counting the buckets of sweat that were shed by 700,000 slaves over 100 years on some 7,000 sugar, coffee, cocoa, cotton, and indigo plantations.
What nation today is routinely excluded from travel guides on the Caribbean? Haiti.
What nation has the lowest literacy rate in the Americas? Haiti.
What people, caught in the crosshairs of historical karma and environmental disaster, have the lowest daily calorie intake in the western hemisphere? Haitians.
From the time King Ferdinand of Spain congratulated Columbus on his Christmas day landfall near Cap Haïtien then declared open season on West Africans for his New World sugar plantations there, Haiti has been a land of warm and gracious people racked by violence and suffering.
Here's some history behind that heavily symbolic kettle of new year's soup: After the 1492 landfall, Spain stayed long enough to kill off the native Arawaks with Old World diseases, import sugar cane cuttings from the Canary Islands, and establish plantations with African slaves...but then left Haiti to the French in 1697 (Peace of Ryswyck) when she found easier pickings elsewhere in the New World.
France wasted no time. Under Kings Louis XIV, XV, and XVI, she transformed those depopulated mountains and valleys into cash crop factories of sugar, indigo, and cotton. How? With 2,500 African slaves in 1698...that jumped to 10,000 in 3 years...and to over 500,000 by 1791--culled largely from tribes in Congo, Angola, Dahomey, Guinea, and Senegal. Their treatment was so horrific, so inhuman, that I haven't the heart to tell. They died like flies and had to be constantly replaced by new shipments from Africa.
So what happened in 1789 when the French people rose up and proclaimed Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!? After all, the French National Assembly's Declaration of the Rights of Man clearly stated, "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights."
Oh, well. Ahem. National Assemblymen in Paris said, oh yes, we guess that means Haiti too...or at least the freed mulattoes there, those fine sons of Frenchmen and their African slaves. No way, said the racist colonialists in Haiti--and they conducted such a tough lobby that the National Assembly reversed itself in 1791.
Haiti's mulattoes could not believe their ears. It was the last straw. They immediately joined their education, knowledge, and considerable military experience to those 500,000 enslaved Africans--and Haiti exploded in revolt. In August 1791, Vodou priest Boukman Duffy convened slave rebel leaders in the forest overlooking Le Cap. Illuminated by flashes of lightening, they made incantations...they slit the throat of a pig and drank its blood...and they formally swore death to all blancs, which they carried out to the letter with pruning hooks, machetes, and fire. In November, Louis-Jacques Bauvais' mulatto troops attacked and burned Port-au-Prince, slaughtering whites wherever they found them. They sported white ears as cockades in their caps and committed atrocities against women and children I just don't have the heart to tell.
And that was just the start.
Great leaders arose to lead the revolution. Ill-fated Toussaint L'Ouverture, who died in a French prison lamented by poet Wordsworth: "Thy friends are exultations, agonies/And love, and man's unconquerable mind." Henri Christophe. Jean-Jacques Dessalines. And these former slaves led their people first against their colonial masters, in the name of the French Republic. Then against Spain and England, who pounced, chops slavering, when they saw the Pearl of the Antilles slipping from French hands. Then, finally, against France herself, when First Consul Napoleon sent brother-in-law Leclerc and 55,000 crack officers and men instructed to, as he confided to foreign minister Talleyrand, annihilate the government of blacks in Haiti and restore slavery at the first opportunity. "Rid us of these gilded Africans," Napoleon later said, "and we shall have nothing more to wish."
Thirteen long years, all told, of tit-for-tat torched cities, slit throats, scorched earth, attacks, betrayals, mass executions, sieges, torture, encirclements, and despair, not to mention 10,000 deaths from malaria and yellow fever. Dessalines' ultimate winning strategy: koupe tèt, boule kay, cut off the heads, burn down. In the end, some 300,000 Haitians died and 50,000 French--and in the end, the French were defeated. General Rochambeau was given 10 days to pack up his army and ship home.
Which brings us back, harrowed, to the dawn of 1804 and that kettle of soup joumou.
When the last French ship had cleared Le Cap, Dessalines sent word to Gérin at Les Cayes: "There is no more doubt, mon cher général, the country is ours, and the famous who-shall-have-it is settled." In Gonaïves, he divided up the war chest--8 gourdes per man; he dispersed his army to the principal towns; and he sat down with his generals "to ratify in ink what they had written in blood."
On January 1, 1804, people started gathering at dawn at Gonaïves' Place d'Armes. Dessalines mounted the Autel de la Patrie to speak. He recited the cruelties of their enslavement in Kreyol, so everyone could understand him, and he declared that Haitians would forever after live free and die free. "Long live independence!" he shouted at the end of the ceremony, having no idea what a difficult life it would be. Cannons were fired; church bells, rung; people cheered; and, they say, kettles of fragrant soup joumou perfumed the air, ready to be ladled up in a mass communion.
It's a great image. No wonder this soup has become the touchstone of Haiti's fervent wish for peace and freedom--its symbol of communion and brotherhood--a beacon that shines through today's dark days of poverty and continuing political strife. One thing is sure, on January 1, Haitians around the world make it and eat it and share it precisely to remember the past and to hope for the future.
Oh, and there are lots of other stories about soup joumou too. Some say, pure and simple, it's a good luck charm for the new year--and you better eat it cause it's bad luck if you don't. Others say, no, it's really to cleanse and purify the body for the new year...and don't eat anything else til midnight, when you can eat an orange and count your luck in the coming year by its number of seeds. Others yet say it honors the Vodou god Papa Loko, keeper of African spiritual traditions, and that it reliably "lifts up a man's soul and makes him prophesy."
There's something to that last comment. This is a fabulous stuffed soup--bright yellow-orange and sensuously African with an opulence of meat, vegetables, and the Caribbean bite of lime and chilis. In Kreyol, you'd say it was stuffed with vyann, joumou, kawot, seleri, zanyon, nave, pomdete, malanga, and shou...and spiced with piman bouk, ten, lay, and sitwon.
Pat Solley
Resources: Alix's Corner at Discover Haiti website, Madison Smartt Bell's All Soul's Rising, Roseline Ng Cheong-Lom's Haiti, Devra Dedeaux' Sugar Reef Caribbean Cookbook, James Ferguson's Traveler's Literary Companion to the Caribbean, Robert and Nancy Heinl's Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492-1971, National Assembly of France's "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen," 8/26/1789, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories, Mirta Yurnet-Thomas' A Taste of Haiti, William Wordsworth's Collected Poetry, and an assortment of encyclopedias, articles, and websites.
this article is available in its entirety at: http://www.soupsong.com/zdec02.html
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