In Haiti, close relation between the living and the dead

LES CAYES, Haiti: Haiti’s unusually close relationship between the living and the dead has helped hide, in part, the huge toll of Saturday’s earthquake: People in Haiti want to be close to their deceased relatives, to the point of sometimes burying them in their front yards.

Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency puts the number of dead from the quake at almost 2,200. Questions had arisen about how such a large number of dead could have been handled or buried so quickly, but amateur burials and overflowing private funeral parlors may explain where all the bodies went.

The magnitude 7.2 earthquake injured more than 12,000 people, destroyed or damaged more than 100,000 homes and left about 30,000 families homeless, officials said. Schools, offices and churches — and even funeral homes and cemeteries — were demolished or badly damaged.

The quake also brought the living and the dead even closer in a nation which, like Mexico, celebrates a Day of the Dead holiday: In the countryside outside the city of Les Cayes, some of the frontyard burial crypts were broken open by the force of the quake, exposing coffins inside.

And some of the living came closer to the grave than anyone should: Serge Chery, the head of civil defense for the Southern Province, which covers Les Cayes, said that his officers had found two women buried in the rubble of a two-story apartment building because they had been able to communicate with the outside world via cellphones.

Such stories are common rumors in disaster zones. Chery said his department received innumerable false reports of such calls.

“We dialed one number that people said was sending messages from a collapsed house, and a living person answered it in Jeremie,” a nearby city.

But Chery refused to call the real cellphone rescue a miracle.

“The only miracle was that they had their phones charged and in their hands at the time of the quake, and they had sufficient room to dial afterward,” Chery said.

Government hospital morgues, like the one at the Les Cayes’ general hospital, are almost empty. That’s because, as the hospital’s director admits, they haven’t had working refrigeration at the morgue for at least three months due to problems with the electrical equipment.