Haiti This article is more than 14 years oldNo room in the cemetery for Haiti dead
This article is more than 14 years oldLast home of country's most famous families turns from place of respect and mourning into installation of horrorEven in death, there is no dignity for the abandoned people of Haiti. The Grand Cimetière, the last home of the country's most famous families, has in five days turned from a place of respect and mourning into an installation of horror.
It begins just a few feet into the cemetery. Pass the elegant arched entrance and walk along the central path that snakes through the tombs lined on either side like miniature suburban houses. First you are assailed by the smell, an acrid odour of death that wrenches the stomach and sticks to you like glue.
The smell is bad, but the sights are worse. Far worse. Bodies are piled up along the path, dumped one upon the other. A couple of chickens are pecking at them like corn. One of them, a woman with braided hair perhaps in her 30s, has her hands in a rigor mortis embrace, as though she had been trying to cling on to life and never let it go.
A few feet further in, we come across a hand-wagon. It is old and rustic, like something out of an Antonioni movie. Inside about six bodies are stacked in jumbled postures. The wagon sits there, with its cargo, under the crosses of the tombs, making some twisted comment about God's will be done. One of the bodies has its hand outstretched and when a car passes by, bringing into the cemetery yet another corpse, it hits the arm and makes it swing like a creaking door.
Every five minutes a new body is brought in, most in simple coffins, fashioned out of rough bits of salvaged wood; one has been made out of old cupboard doors. Suddenly, six men rush by, carrying on their shoulders a fancy lacquered coffin, heading for one of the tombs of a wealthy family.
Poor Haitian families don't enjoy such luxury of mourning. A tomb on the right side of the walkway has been opened to allow the body of a 14-year-old girl, swaddled in white cloth and laid out in a pick-up truck, to be added beside the remains of her parents. Above the opening, the word "réparation" has been scrawled. We ask the cemetery workers standing nearby what that signifies. "It means the family has no money," one worker tells us in broken French. "They cannot pay." A truck with the young girl on board later drove off, her body unburied.
How much money are we talking about, we ask, what are you charged to lay a teenaged girl to rest? A hundred dollars, the workers say.
Officials from the city council in charge of the cemetery tell us that the bodies dumped along the path were all brought by families who couldn't afford to pay.
Outside the cemetery, a man is sitting on a car looking busy. He is keeping a registry of the new arrivals. He already has 210 names on his list, some identified by just their first name.
An elderly man walks out of the cemetery, looking weary and clutching a handkerchief to his face. He has just put his sister and niece into the family tomb. Marie Eve Alcindor, 63, and Sarah, 32, died when the roof of the family clothes shop fell on them. Marie Eve had arrived in Port-au-Prince one week before the earthquake to visit her family. She had come from New York, where she worked as a paediatrician. "My sister was a doctor and she cared for children," says Jean-Pierre Alcindor. "So for her to come here, die here, and now we cannot even care for her body with dignity – do you know how that feels?"
Marie Eve's own children had wanted to take her body back to America for burial. But there were no trucks to carry her, no flights, no companies that would take her. After five days, the body by now decomposing, they called off the effort and ventured instead into the Grand Cimetière.
Standing beside Jean-Pierre Alcindor was his nephew Orel. He survived because when the family shop collapsed, he was at the back of the building and managed to crouch under a car that protected him. He was pulled from the rubble for hours after the quake, bearing scratches on his head and arms but otherwise unharmed
"This country was bad long before this," he says. "But now the earthquake has exposed the true face of Haiti."
There is nothing unusual about the story of the Alcindors. Everybody in this city has been touched by death. Many thousands are now struggling with a double challenge: to keep themselves alive in a city without water and food, and to give their loved ones who have died merely the basic, lowliest goodbye.
Details emerge unexpectedly. Our driver, who is from the Dominican Republic, Rafael, asked us to make a detour. He wanted to deliver $60 to his good friend Kelya, who had been his secretary a few years ago when he lived in Port-au-Prince.
He had heard that she was having trouble with the arrangements for her brother Marcos, who died at work when his office collapsed. His body was being kept at a local funeral home, with only a ceiling fan to keep it from rotting. The funeral home demanded $1,200 to give Marcos a proper burial. With the price came a threat: pay up the money today, or Marcos will be sent to one of the mass graves that have been opened up outside the city.
The average income in Haiti is under $400 a year. Kelya could not pay.
"We can't stand the idea of not having a concrete place where we will be able to pray for my brother," Kelya told us.
In the end, with the help of Rafael's donation and countless others like it from family, neighbours and friends, she managed to raise $600. Then she persuaded the funeral home to accept half now, the rest later. Marcos will not end up cast away in a mass grave after all. Instead he will be given a funeral in a small Catholic church near Kelya's home.
We drive past another Catholic church, L'Eglise Sacré Coeur de Jésus, a few miles away. It was shattered in the earthquake. Its massive stained glass window at the back has fallen in one great slab, and now lies propped up against the cracked wall at a 45-degree angle.
The front of the church has fared even worse. It has almost entirely been reduced to rubble. The only thing left standing is a wooden effigy of Jesus on the cross. Beneath it is an inscription in the stone bearing the date of the church, 1928. It reads: "That in your love and caring, oh Lord, Haiti will live and prosper."
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