Editorials & Other Articles

riversedge

(70,239 posts) Wed Dec 13, 2017, 03:15 PM Dec 2017

Tending to Haitis Dead

Tending to Haiti’s Dead

Nearly eight years after the earthquake, some Haitians remain blisteringly poor. Many cannot bury their loved ones. One group of men has stepped in.

In Haiti’s capital, death is often harder to afford than life. The men who tend to the bodies told their stories to New York Times journalists.

by catherine porter Photographs and Video by Daniel Berehulak dec. 13, 2017

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The 10 men step into their white polypropylene coveralls, zip them up, and then snap on latex gloves. Some knot plastic bags around their running shoes. Others fashion white funeral palls into makeshift surgical caps.................................

................Like the country itself, Burial Road stretches between those who have everything and those with nothing. Even modest funeral parlors offer elaborate services starting at $1,100 — far beyond the means of most Haitians, who live on $2 a day or less.

No matter how rich in love they may be, most people can’t pay those fees. And so, the bodies of their sons and mothers wait here so long that their faces melt, their skin unravels. They are stacked one atop another in gruesome, wet piles that resemble medieval paintings of purgatory.

The men who have finally come to their rescue aren’t friends or relatives. They don’t know their individual stories. But they recognize poverty.......................

He is haunted by the image of the son he adored being dumped like garbage. For as long as anyone can remember, that’s what has happened to the destitute.

One month passes since Mackenley’s body arrived at the funeral parlor. Then another.

Finally, it is September, and the abandoned bodies have begun to pile up in Zenith’s two morgues. There are 47 of them — some from the hospital and others, like Mackenley, from the community. The neighbors have not started to complain about the smell, but Mrs. Louis thinks they will soon.

So she sends a message to the St. Luke Foundation that it is time for the burial team to come again..................................