Serious question for this group, and only the serious need reply.

[PufPuf23]

4. I know nothing about NOLA.

However, I can give you some info about about Voodoun-Christian syncretics and the Haitian community in the USA.

See Michael Bertiaux: http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/8522/bertiaux.html&date=2009-10-25+05:46:54

High up, on the thirty-third floor of a residential apartment
block on South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, lives a Voodoo
priest. He is a gently spoken man with intense eyes, heavy-
rimmed glasses and a dark, full-bodied beard. By day he works
as a government-counsellor, hearing welfare grievances
mainly from the Haitian community in the city. In his private
time, however, he celebrates the mysteries of Guede and
Legbha, the Voodoo counterpart of the dead and risen Christ.
Michael Bertiaux is by no means a typicai occultist. lndeed
it is difficult to say whether - in the traditional sense - he
is a black or white magician. He's not really sure himself.
Most occultists, he says, resort to techniques at both ends of
the spectrum. However he does admit that'life is so complex that
we sometimes have to do things to survive that would have
been considered, at one time, forms of black magic.'


also see wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bertiaux

I am a hobbiest that collects and reads esoteric books and histories for fun and have no direct experience at all with Voodoun (went to Ye Olde Voodoo Shoppe in French Quarter at Mardi Gras in 1972, only time ever been in NOLA).

Bertiaux has published trade books by also has written $$$$ grimoires not ever seen on the open market. He would past the test for whack-a- doodle Christian-Voudon mix but some consider him extraordinary in the European and American occult community. Evidently as far back as the 1700 slave trade, there was cross pollenation / syncretism with French Christian mysticism and Haitian Voudon. There are a variety of flavors and some are scams or superstitions or taken seriously at least as a culture (and why I copied that about Bertriaux working within the American Haitian community in Chicago as Voudoun is a culture, in both government and Voudon status as an example). Voudon is originallly an African religion brought by the slave trade to Haiti and then modified.