Andrelli & Ite
There are so many of these stories to tell, but due to space and time constraints I will tell only one more. It is an interesting and fascinating story. Andrelli is my brother in Christ who was saved out of a vodou camp and has been going around with me evangelizing vodou camps every day for the last couple of years. Well Andrelli, like Sano, also evangelizes on his time off. He frequently goes around to vodou camps that he knows about and sits with the respective priests to share the gospel. If he feels that they are undergoing regeneration, he brings me into the camp to answer all of their questions and teach them more about the Christian life.
Malefactors and dark black magic
This story finds its roots in a meeting with a vodou priest that was initiated by Andrelli. This vodou priest is not just any priest though. This young man’s name is Ite (pronounced EE-TAY), and he is a malefactor. This is a term reserved for the priests involved in the darkest black magic, including harm to humans and even, in the extreme cases, human sacrifice. In fact, the way that Andrelli met this man is interesting.
Andrelli was walking home on a dark night. As he was passing by a tree, a shadow stepped out from behind and Andrelli felt a rope suddenly cinch around him. Andrelli was able to escape and got into a physical altercation with the dark figure. This figure turned out to be Ite. That night Ite was under the influence of his demon and to this day he doesn’t remember doing this.
I was very proud of how Andrelli viewed this situation though. Andrelli saw this altercation as a work of God, revealing a man who needed to hear the gospel. So, as a true man of God would, Andrelli saw Ite’s attempt to catch him in a rope as God’s way of telling him to witness to Ite—and he did! I didn’t even know anything about this until Andrelli came to me and told me that he had been witnessing to Ite for weeks and he wanted me to meet him.
"Andrelli saw this altercation as a work of God, revealing a man who needed to hear the gospel."
After preparing with prayer one afternoon, I went to meet Ite. When we arrived, I looked around his property and saw the iron, food hanging in the trees to feed the demon, and beads and bottles hanging all over to further appease the demon. Ite then walked out, a small, unassuming man with a very intense, hardened face.
He also has a severe curvature of the spine that has produced a large bowling ball sized bulge on one side of his back. He said that his back was normal until he made a deal with the demon. After making the deal (which he wouldn’t give specifics about), he woke up the next morning with his back deformed as I saw it that day.
Vodou starts early
I spoke to him for a while about his life, and what he revealed was that a demon had approached him at a young age. The demon had asked him to serve it and worship it in exchange for power, and Ite agreed. As I dug a little further, Ite told us the names of the 3 demons that he routinely / daily serves. I won’t print any demon’s names here for the safety of the reader but these demons are very evil and passionate about destroying humans.
Ite continued to tell us that what concerns him is that he no longer has control over the times that the demon possesses him. Every night, between 11:00pm and midnight, the demon enters him whether he wants it or not. From the time that the demon enters Ite to the time that it leaves him (generally between 5:00am and 6:00am), he can’t really remember what he has done while the demon is controlling him. His memory during the time of possession ends up as fragmented bits and pieces of disconnected events.
"Every night, between 11:00pm and midnight, the demon enters him whether he wants it or not."
When I was questioning him, my goal was to discern how he felt about all of this. What the Holy Spirit discerned for me was that this young man was very afraid. So I used this information to tell him that I knew he was afraid and we wanted to help. But we needed him to tell us what type of help he needed.
But how does one leave vodou?
Ite told us that he wants us to help him know Jesus. He desperately wants to leave the demon but he doesn’t know how. At this time, I was with Destine, Jameson, and my friend Ian. We all discussed what to do. (Ian and Jameson are both from Indianapolis and decided to come and join us for extended periods of times on the field in Haiti to discern if God is calling them into missions.)
We collectively decided that God was moving us to come to Ite between 11:00pm and midnight so that we could physically be there when the demon came over him. This way we could pray over him, read Scripture and send this demon away. This is definitely a dangerous thing to do, especially at those hours of the night, but the one thing that pushed me to go was his fear.
I was looking at a young man in complete bondage to powerful demons and he wants to be free. If I hadn’t seen that genuine desire to be free from the demons, that was expressed through his fear, I wouldn’t have agreed to do this. After spending a considerable amount of time in prayer and calling out to others to pray over this situation, Jameson, Ian, Andrelli, Jean Dady Thomas (our driver), and I left the house at 10:30pm.
Nowhere to be found
We showed up to Ite's home around 10:50pm. When we stepped onto his property, Ite was nowhere to be found, despite the fact that we had told him to be there at this time. There was evidence of recent service to the demon as the iron was decorated with beads and bottles that hadn’t been there when we had visited earlier that day. Other than that, the only other aberrant thing was a huge spider that was on the wall outside of Ite’s little room.
We waited for about 30 minutes but he never showed up. Andrelli told us to wait there and he ran down to see Ite’s madam to question her about his whereabouts. He returned a little later and said that Ite’s madam had told him that the demon had possessed Ite earlier than usual that evening, around 9:00pm.
Knowing that it would be futile to stay there, as he could be anywhere doing anything, we decided to leave and revisit this the next day. The next day we went to Peredo, where Ite lives. While on the street I spotted him sitting under a small shelter on the side of the road made of some palm branches. We got off of our motorcycles and Andrelli ran over and brought him to us.
We asked Ite what had happened the night before and he told us the same story his madam had. So after a short discussion we decided to meet him that night at around 7:30pm so that we could pray over him and just sit with him for however long it took before the demon manifested. He was agreeable to this and said that he would meet us. So once again, we traveled to Peredo that evening and went to Ite’s home where we had set the meeting. But Ite was not there.
We sat there for quite some time to no avail. There was no ceremonial paraphanalia that had been there the night before, and nothing else out of the ordinary happened. Interestingly, though, the exact same large spider was there again, but positioned at a slightly different spot on the wall. Andrelli once again went out in search of any information on Ite’s location.
Defense
When he returned, much to our surprise, we heard that the demon had come over Ite about an hour before we arrived. We were told that the demon never comes over him that early. Then it hit me what was going on. The demons were listening to our plans that we were making verbally out loud with Ite. The demons were simply playing defense to our offense, therefore, they were always a step ahead of us. We once again decided to return home.
"Then it hit me what was going on. The demons were listening to our plans that we were making verbally out loud with Ite."
Two days later we were in Peredo and went to Ite’s home in the early afternoon and we found him there. We expressed our thoughts and concerns about what was going on and we asked him if he would be willing to go with us right then and spend the next 24 hours with us. We offered to feed him that evening and bring him back home with enough food to his family for weeks. What ensued next was very odd.
He said no to our generous offer and began to undergo strange contortions on his face, especially his eyes. When we asked him if he was alright, he responded that he felt the demon near or on him, but not in him. Our reflex was to pray over him, so we began to encircle him which made him very uncomfortable. We stopped and I advanced toward him to sit on a rock adjacent to him to talk.
As I began to sit down, Ite jumped up and walked far away from me. All of us picked up on this, so Ian walked toward him to check his response. Once again, as Ian advanced toward him, Ite would back up. So we kept our distance and asked him if we could pray over him in an attempt to rid the demon from him. Ite became visibly afraid and told us the only way that he would let us pray was if we didn’t touch him at all, and we agreed not to stand over him or behind him.
His body language during this time was strange and odd. He appeared as a small dog backing up in fear as you come toward it with a stick. The dog’s eyes stay focused directly on you and it crouches and backs up slowly. This is exactly how Ite appeared. This wasn’t the same Ite we had talked to over the last week, he was something different—not necessarily possessed, but definitely aware of some angry or disciplining presence that was telling him to get away from us.
Late for an appointment
We asked him bluntly if he wants the demon gone. He didn’t really answer directly but told us that he was late for an appointment. When asked about the nature of the appointment, Ite told us that he had introduced a man to his demon so that the man could make a request, through Ite, for money. The man had supposedly received the money and now Ite had to bring the man back to the meeting place in order to receive orders from the demon concerning what the man owed.
At this point, Ite was obviously wanting to run away from us, secondary to his palpable level of fear. We told him that we would adhere to all of the requests that he made, in terms of us praying for him. We went ahead and all prayed for him as we stood 3 feet in front of him with no hands laid on him. I opened my eyes during prayer and saw that Ite was extremely uncomfortable with all of this and his eyes were going through some type of spasm or seizure.
Nowhere to be found, again
When we finished praying, we went to shake his hand and he acted very afraid. He did reach out and shake our hands very quickly. But as soon as he did, the encounter was over and he was on his way to his ‘appointment’ that we are sure was a lie that had been fabricated to get away from us. From that day, about 4-5 weeks ago, I haven’t been able to find Ite, but please pray that we do. Ite needs to be delivered from his very heavy bondage. He is afraid and has good reason to be, as he has listened to the demons lies for decades. He thinks that if he breaks his engagement with the demons and turns to Christ, he will surely die. So he is afraid and feels like there is no way to win this battle that he is caught up in. But we know different. The only victory for Ite is through Jesus Christ, so please join me in praying that God opens this young man’s heart and mind so that he no longer believes the demonic lies, but receives the truth of Christ and the cross.