No fear for living among dead
Published:Friday | July 9, 2010 | 12:00 AM
Daraine Luton, Senior Staff Reporter
THEY HAD no unripe limes or horseshoes in their pockets. Nor did they wear their shirts inside out to ward off evil spirits. Such are the usual superstitions of the living among the dead.
"Wi fear di live man, not the dead man," one clean-up crewman said yesterday as he kicked a skull from his path in Kingston's May Pen Cemetery.
The 200-acre burial ground has been a beehive of activity since authorities decided that clearing overgrowth was a great way of providing employment to hundreds of idle hands in Tivoli Gardens, west Kingston.
The mass clean-up has revealed the poor state of many graves there. Some of them have collapsed and skeletons are scattered everywhere.
Town Clerk Errol Greene told The Gleaner on Tuesday that the situation presented a public-health risk, especially with dozens of skulls and other bones sprawled across the property.
Kingston Mayor Desmond McKenzie, who toured the cemetery yesterday, admitted that the city's municipal council has failed in its mandate to provide a salubrious resting place of those interred.
"The management of the cemetery has not done enough to ensure that the graves are dug to the specified dimensions," McKenzie said yesterday.
Cemetery workers told The Gleaner that in many instances paupers' graves were dug three feet deep and were often breached by scavenging animals.
The law stipulates that graves be dug at least five feet deep. McKenzie also said that many of the bodies were flushed from eroded dirt graves.
Touch not
Workers at the May Pen Cemetery have been given strict instructions not to tamper with the skeletal remains and have been provided with protective gear.
William Broughton, director of environmental health in the Ministry of Health, said workers have been told to treat every case of exposed bones as suspect.
"We don't know the cause of death, so everyone in the cemetery must take precaution," he said.
Broughton told The Gleaner that said microorganisms could still be living among the dead.
"We need to get them (bones) reinterred as quickly as possible, mainly because of cultural reasons," Broughton said, while adding that though a public-health threat may exist, it did not mean the spread of disease was imminent.
As the workers braved the searing sun to chop away vegetation, dignity - perhaps the last request before the deceased had breathed their last - was a bygone luxury.
Two men briefly kicked around a skull as if they were playing football. At another section, two skulls rescued from a waterway and placed atop a wall were decorated with an energy drink can and two cigarettes. One man also vowed the dead would not get any of his rum.