Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Angel Boats




Today I witnessed a sad but interesting incident from several perspectives. Yesterday, 2 children died on the USNS COMFORT. They were supposed to be returned on an “Angel Boat”, but it got rescheduled for this morning. The mother of the baby waited all night by herself. One of our warrant officers sat with her and comforted her in the morning. In the afternoon, the baby arrived, but they couldn’t find anyone to drive it home to be buried. They decided to place it in one of the tents nearby and wait. Unfortunately, the tent they placed it in belonged to the Haitian executive officer of the base. He was very upset because of the evil spirits in the body. In many cultures death is bad luck, and having a dead body in a tent like that, there is a big risk that evil spirits will get into the tent. In the end, the whole mess got sorted out, but I got to hear this story from several different people.
1. The Haitian Coast Guard officer was upset and talked to me about it because of the evil spirit situation. No cab driver would pick up the mother and dead baby, and the Haitian CG did not want to drive it because of the evil spirits either.
2. The warrant officer was upset because she wanted to advocate for the mother and felt that not enough was being done to comfort her and help her.
3. Later this evening, the chaplain talked with me concerning his frustrations with the warrant officer. He said the day before the mother was screaming and wailing by herself and going through the grieving process. When the warrant officer came to comfort her, the chaplain accused her of stalling the mother’s grieving process. Additionally, he was upset because she encroached on his territory--experience in death.

This incident was very interesting to me because 3 different people chose me to voice their opinions over the situation to me, and I was able to sympathize with all 3 viewpoints. It just goes to show, not everything is as it seems, and there are many angles of a story, even one that seems simple.

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