Cholera outbreak denies dignity in death for Haitian victims (Feature)

By Silvia Ayuso (dpa) Nov 23, 2010, 8:27 GMT

Port-au-Prince - The trucks have returned to roads of dirt and stone in Titayen, outside Port-au-Prince. For capital dwellers, that is a very ominous sign.

Titayen now means one thing, above all: mass graves. It is the anonymous burial without ceremony for thousands - or even tens of thousands - of victims of the January earthquake and now of the latest catastrophe to hit the country, cholera.

At first glance the landscape is idyllic, tree-lined hills from which one can see the sea. But one need not walk far before stumbling on the first vestiges of the horror contained under the surface. A human hipbone here, a femur emerging from the dirt there, a nearly full skeleton down the way, among garbage and shreds of clothing and shoes that illustrate the haste with which the bodies were disposed up 10 months ago, without proper burial or dignity.

In August, a Dominican firm collecting gravel for road building had to move its operations hundreds of metres, after having dug too near one of the mass graves and provoking a cascade of bones onto the trucks, a worker named Nono explained.

These days, the lorries that transport the bodies of cholera victims rumble to a mass-burial site that is detectable among the weeds and grazing cows by some stone mounds marking where the earthquake victims were interred.

Nearby, a pile of red dirt recently dug up from a fresh burial pit, already filling with bodies, at the site already known as 'the cholera graves.'

Unlike during the quake aftermath, the bodies brought to the area now are in sealed plastic bags, following a new health protocol of the government that includes required decontamination with bleach.

Nevertheless, one of the body bags in the pit was half open. Waiting for two more trucks to bring the rest of the day's toll, worker Claudel Pierre said 13 bodies had been deposited so far.

'Every day, they bring more and more,' he said, noting that 11 bodies were sent the previous day.

Haiti's official death toll from the cholera epidemic has passed 1,300. It is feared that the real number could be much higher, because the former refers only to treated cases and nobody knows how many cases have not been attended to by medical staff.

Epidemiologists warn that the disease has probably not yet peaked, and is likely to be in the country for many years.

The morgue of Port-au-Prince's central hospital is no longer receiving bodies from outside its own special cholera ward, which fills daily with patients suffering from varying degrees of the disease but all of whom appear ashen from the effects of rapid dehydration.

A brief notice from the Health Ministry informs readers about the new directive:

'Bodies of cholera victims will not be admitted to the hospital morgue during the period of epidemic. Bodies recovered in the streets, without signs of violent death, will be received due to sanitary precautions.'

'We had never rejected any body here before, but these are orders of the government,' director Pierre Yves Jovin said.

He said the morgue had 47 cholera victims the previous week. After the ministry order, the bodies were taken to a mass grave 'outside of town,' he said, a vague reference to Titayen.

After a death from vomiting and diarrhoea, they are allowed only an anonymous end, tossed into a pit and quickly covered, condemned to obscurity in a land overflowing with death and tragedy.

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