Haiti earthquake: no dignity for the dead

From The London Telegraph-

The Grande Cimètiere, the Haitian capital's crumbling old cemetery, has become the main stage for the ghastliest scenes of the city's catastrophe – the disposal of the dead.
While some of the corpses of the tens of thousands recovered since last Tuesday's earthquake have been loaded into trucks and summarily dumped in mass graves outside the city, others are brought to the local cemetery where they are disposed of with equal ceremony.


Pickup trucks and makeshift ambulances deliver the dead at the rate of one every five minutes, names – sometimes just the first one – scrawled down by a man who showed 210 of them filling up three pages.

For many, the journey ends just a few yards inside the cemetery entrance, graced with its Biblical quotation to "Remember that you are dust".

Reflecting an obvious desperation to complete the job as quickly as possible, dozens of bodies have been dumped on the edge of the path, their coffins and boxes presumably too valuable to be left. Half a dozen are piled on to a hand cart, decomposing quickly in the heat.
Others are strewn across the ground, their bodies picked at by chickens.

Space is scarce in the cemetery – nominally Catholic but also used by Voodoo practitioners – and arguments quickly break out between coffin carriers about where to put the bodies.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/haiti/7013038/Haiti-earthquake-no-dignity-for-the-dead.html