Lekban nabaya, Lekban nabaya, Lekban nabaya, Seu kipote doappo, Seu kapas dolei bulwayo.

Hation dates is, are neither good nor bad. There is no evil spirit. Spirits can be equally

evil and equally good. And the idea is, evil does exist. You have to be able as a human

being to have control over it.

As Patrick Belgaard Smith puts it, Haiti is 60% Catholic, 40% Protestant, and 100% voodoo.

He grew up a member of Haiti's small aristocracy of light-skinned elites who rejected their own

African roots. Today he's a scholar of Africology at the University of Wisconsin and a voodoo priest.

But he's nothing like Belalugosi, the mad voodoo priest in a 1932 Hollywood horror film

that introduced the cartoonish connection between voodoo and sticking pins into dolls.

The truth is not necessarily less magical, but it is more interesting.

voodoo is a philosophical, spiritual world view, with 6,000-year-old roots in the part

of West Africa we now know as Benin. And it is a window onto the inner life of the Haitian

people. I'm Christopher Tippett, and this is on being.

I spoke with Patrick Belgaard Smith in 2007. His grandfather, Dantez Belgaard, was Haiti's

ambassador to the United States, the Vatican, and the League of Nations. As a leader of his

class, Dantez Belgaard spoke classic French and saw voodoo as primitive. Following in his

grandfather's footsteps, Patrick Belgaard Smith came to the U.S. to study political science.

And in the U.S., he found himself drawn into the spiritual world of voodoo. This year

he was awarded the Jean-Price Mars Medal for his work illuminating the tradition.

Well, this is where the common it seems, among Haitians who leave Haiti. They become

very intrigued by it once they have reached the United States of France, or Canada, and

elsewhere, because it becomes part of their Haitianness. All of a sudden, they discover

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