Stripes of voodoo?

Dominican Republic staff member Claire Hodgson accidentally causes cross-cultural outrage with a paintbrush...

I was so upset: ‘What is wrong with everyone?’ I wondered as I sighed and picked up my paintbrush again.

The paint job was well underway when Pastor Jonny stopped and gazed at the brightly striped wall. He started shaking his head; “That is bad. Very bad.”

We had offered to paint the outside of the computer centre which had just been re-plastered. ‘What colour would you like us to paint it?’ we asked the children. After a little to-ing and fro-ing they agreed on blue and yellow. We found two lovely shades. For the time being we separated the blocks of colour with masking tape to make sure the colours wouldn’t bleed together too messily.

 Another couple of grown ups walked by – they stopped to look more closely, their jaws dropped and their eyes nearly popped out of their heads. They shook their heads and ran off. Nobody would tell us what was wrong with a blue and yellow striped wall.

One of the children finally explained to us: blue and yellow stripes were a voodoo symbol – this was no design for a church youth centre! We negotiated possible compromises? What if we lightened the shades of blue and yellow with white paint? How about extra squares of colour?

Finally there was a cry of joy from the neighbouring wall. With the paint dry, the villagers had started peeling back the masking tape we had placed between the stripes to prevent colour bleed. This revealed a narrow strip of white between the two colours. Blue and yellow stripes were only evil … if they touched! Suddenly everyone was overjoyed and matters of voodoo were quickly forgotten.

It was a real eye-opener and a lesson for me: I just wanted to tell them “don’t be so silly and superstitious, it’s just stripes of paint!” But for the local families Ascension Voodoo is a huge issue. And so we had to respect that to keep their respect.

And the wall looks fantastic, bearing the distinctly un-voodoo message ‘Dios te bendiga':  'God bless you’ in English."