Adventurer Fever World Nomads Travel Film Scholarship: New Orleans and Mardi Gras 2014!

Before going to New Orleans I thought that Voodoo was only witchcraft - focused on sticking malicious needles in dolls. I had never read or investigated the subject, but somehow these were the ideas that were dominating my thoughts in the ceremony room of the Voodoo Temple. However, this is where Priestess Miriam offered to perform a ritual to read my destiny. The python she wears on her head doesn´t calm me down - especiallybecause we are about to have a meeting with the spirits to talk about what future holds for me. Never before has anyone read my chart or threw the cards, but I don´t refuse the offer of a Voodoo queen to throw the bones.

First, I shake the seashells and bones then let them fall from my hand onto the table of ceremonies, One of them bounces and goes directly to the floor. Quite a bad way to start predicting my future. "Did it fall facing up or facing down?", Priestess Miriam asks. I look down to the floor but I see nothing. It´s pretty dark and the room is packed with dolls, figures, pictures and amulets. I´m not sure if I believe what´s going on or not, but my heart is beating fast and the idea of one of these bones disappearing is an omen I definitely don´t like it at all. So after a few seconds and more detailed and search - I find it. It landed under the table, facing up.

I´m not really sure about how or why, but this means, according to Priestess Miriam, that by the end of the year I will have a baby. The news, perplexes and shocks me. I´m not ready to bring a baby to this world and even less to do it alone. Therefore, I decide to take my reading as funny (if not accurate), while Miriam goes on telling me about the luck of my projects.

At some point, I get kind of lost. The ambience is loaded with energy and I can´t stop from distracting myself - imagining the thousands of stories that live in the room, inmortalized in each one of the offering that fill the temple. Miriam tells me about the origins of Voodoo (a part of the practices of some African cultures), how it arrived to the continent of America (when New Orleans became a slave trading centre) and that Voodoo is more than dolls and needles. Voodoo is about a practice that, above all things, it is employed to establish communication with the spirits and and improve quality of life.

From my visit to the temple I take away the notion that Voodoo is much more interesting and complex than what I used to think, and start to wonder if a stork might be on her way to Argentina with a little naughty curly haired kid...