Decent Burials a Dead End for Haitians

Local funeral parlors are fielding non-stop calls for service from Haitians

By HANK TESTER and TODD WRIGHT

Updated 6:58 AM EDT, Tue, Feb 2, 2010

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The death and destruction in Haiti is so bad, even undertakers are disturbed.

Haitian undertakers in South Florida may participate in the most gruesome part of the clean up in Haiti: preparing the hundreds of thousands of dead for a proper burial.

"It is so powerful, it will not only stop the odor it, will protect everyone around it against all bacteria, " said Fred St. Amand, the president of the family-owned Pax-Villa Funeral Homes, holding a canister used during embalming.

As bodies are found in the rubble of Port-au-Prince, the device will be highly useful.

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Right now saving the living has priority over dealing with the dead, but for the thousands of Haitian-Americans who have lost their loved ones, the phone calls to funeral homes have become a necessity. A recent poll of 400 Haitian American noted that 60 percent of those questioned had lost loved ones or close family members in the Jan. 12 earthquake.

St. Amand believes the percentage is higher by all the calls he has received.

There is a Pax-Villa funeral home in Port-au-Prince but business is at a stand still. The company owns facilities in Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, Miami and Homestead. St. Amand can't fly to Haiti and bodies that were embalmed in preparation for transportation to the U.S. prior to the earthquake are not going to be shipped out anytime soon.

But there will be plenty of bodies that need to be put to rest in Haiti. Thousands of bodies are being dumped in slit trenches because there aren't enough plots to handle the devastation.

St. Amand says families he has served for years were horrified as they saw back-hoes scooping up earthquake victims.

"She came to me and she was so hurt. 'I will pay you $50,000 cash if you can bring my mother home,' " a customer begged St Amand.

Then comes the heart breaker for local Haitian families whose loved ones have not been found but eventually may be removed from the rubble. Many customers want their relatives buried in the U.S., but that won't happen, St. Amand said.

"They are not going to let any decomposed bodies come here," he said.