Friday, 25 July 2014

The thing that bothered me most about collecting bodies at the general hospital in Port-au-Prince wasn't the stench.  True, the cooler had stopped working sometime during the last two weeks and there was concern about the condition of the bodies as they were being moved; the workers offered me a swig from the bottle of whiskey they had brought and Father Enzo ripped strips of fabric off of one of the burial cloths so that we had something to tie over our faces.  But it wasn't that.  It also wasn't the sounds--the sounds of bodies being tossed one on top of the other, and the sickening noise it made when a body slid out of the cooler; I cringed when one hit the ground, but that wasn't the worst part.  Nor was it the sight--the sight of bare feet protruding from the cooler, of bodies spilling and sliding out into the parking lot, of limbs haphazardly entwined and twisted awkwardly in lifeless poses, of so many shells of people that had once lived and breathed, many still clothed, as if they landed here by accident.  No, the thing that bothered me most was the people that kept tapping me on the shoulder.  Tapping me on the shoulder to ask me if they could have one of the rosaries I was handing to Father Enzo to place on each corpse for a blessing before the body bag was zipped closed.  Seemingly oblivious to the pile of abandoned, lifeless bodies stacked mere feet in front of us, people tapped on my shoulder to ask if they could have a cheap plastic rosary (intended for a corpse) to wear around their neck like some misguided jewelry.  To be so desensitized to death spoke to me of existing in a poverty that I will never fully understand.  As I was told shortly after I arrived here, "In Haiti, nothing is an emergency because everybody is in crisis, all the time."