Vodou has no congregation, no membership, no tithe and no collection, and everything is paid for at the point of use. A consultation has a fee; a treatment has a fee; a kanzo initiation costs a very large sum by Haitian standards; a full ceremony requires food for everyone present, drummers, animals, cloth, rum, candles and the priest's fee. Families save for years, borrow, sell things and receive money from relatives abroad earmarked for it. The transactional openness strikes some outside observers as mercenary; practitioners point out that a priest with no salary and no institution behind him has no other means of living, and that the alternative arrangements found elsewhere — endowments, state funding, weekly collections — are also payment, differently disguised. What is genuinely difficult is that the poorest families carry obligations they cannot discharge.