A Dignified Burial

Every Thursday, Fr. Rick Frechette and his team gather bodies from the morgues of St. Damien and the General Hospital and lay them to rest about half an hour outside of Port-au-Prince. I joined them today, along with several other volunteers.

The day began around 9am when we took off for the General Hospital. This was the first time I really had been out of the hospital, and my eyes were opened to the destruction this country has faced. We drove past the Presidential Palace, and all of the other government buildings that are now not much more than piles of crumbled cement. We drove past a number of tent cities that have been made of nothing more than sheets, sticks and rope. We passed lines of people waiting to receive bags of rice.

When we arrived at the hospital (there were probably somewhere around 20 people with us), the team had disposable gowns ready, and they showed us how to use the gown bags as booties to cover our shoes – so I was one of the lucky ones to get those. Once we were all gowned up, we put on our face masks and gloves and headed to the morgue. The hospital staff from the morgue opened up the large coolers that were just filled with bodies piled on top of each other (something like walk-in meat coolers – excuse the description…) and Fr. Rick said a prayer, and that was followed by song. They repeated this in the second cooler, and we received instructions on our tasks.

Fr. Rick and the hospital staff pulled the bodies out of the cooler and placed them in the paper coffins made by a group of guys that grew up in our orphanage and now are living on their own. All of the bodies were covered with a long piece of white paper with the Passionist symbol on it, and in Creole it said, “May the angels meet you in paradise”. A hand-made rosary was also placed in each coffin before it was closed and carried off to the trucks.

The 50 coffins we had were filled, mostly with individual bodies placed inside. What I assume was a mother and her baby child where placed in the same coffin. Another ten infants and babies were placed in another coffin together. The bodies that were left we placed in body bags and carried out.

As you can imagine, the closer they got to the bottom of the pile, the more decayed the bodies were. Without getting too detailed, it was pretty apparent that these people had died quite some time ago.

We arrived at the cemetery about mid-day. There we were met by a band of about 5 men – they are there every week. The local men that dig the graves were there with shovels in hand. I can only imagine how difficult it is to dig those graves in the rocky earth. They had dug I think maybe 7 graves – several coffins placed in each grave.

We unloaded the bodies from the trucks – usually about 4-6 of us carrying a coffin. A few guys were down in the grave to take the bodies from us as we passed them down. The earth between the graves was narrow and loose. Several times as we were carrying the coffins we would slip on the loose dirt and nearly fall…struggling to keep hold of the coffin.

After they were all laid to rest, a prayer was said, and the band played again. The local men began to fill in the graves, and we headed back to the hospital.

The day was incredibly difficult – but very moving and special. The people we buried had not been claimed by family – they had nobody to give them proper burials. This sadly enough, is much too common in Haiti. If the team of St. Damien weren’t to bury these people, they would wind up in mass graves somewhere. It was a beautiful experience to be able to help give them a proper, dignified burial.