Bondye — from bon Dieu — is the creator, is sometimes called Granmèt, the great master, and is functionally absent from practice. He receives no sacrifices, no songs, no drums, no possession, no shrine and no festival. Haitians explain this without defensiveness: Bondye is too great, too distant and too busy to be concerned with an individual's illness or lawsuit, and it would be presumptuous to bother him, which is precisely why he made the lwa and delegated the running of human affairs to them. His name appears constantly in ordinary Haitian speech — si Bondye vle, if God wills — and in the Catholic prayers that open every ceremony. The structure is the same one found across much of West and Central Africa: a high god who is acknowledged, uncontested, and not approached, with the working religion conducted at the level below.