When Death Overcomes Politeness

Force Marie Jacmel from Ciné Institute on Vimeo.

I personally wish I could be there to help. I remember a recent email exchange with a friend about the plight of Detroit, MI and it's unclaimed dead, sitting in a freezer at the morgue, waiting for the 2010 budget year to start so they could bury or cremate the unclaimed remains of the poor or homeless. They had around 70 bodies at the time of the article, and I thought gee- how terrible...This massive disaster certainly brings a whole new perspective on the matter of unclaimed dead...but I really wish they would/could do what Sri Lanka and China did, take a photo of those they are burying so that someone may be able to find out if their friends and relatives are really gone instead of burying them in mass graves without even counting the bodies. Even spray paint or mark the area with a number of bodies or the names of who buried them.

Perhaps mass deaths in a warm climate on this scale just suppresses a normal "let's-give-them-closure" response. I do not know. But the Cine' Institute of film students in Haiti, have done a great job so far of trying to record this as it happens in their country.

My prayers go out to the Haitian people who marched and sang on the streets immediately following the disaster - Que Belle Spirit!!