A deathly funny story (8/16)

Apparently there is a hospital in Laotoka (the old capital). I know this because a man I met recently was hospitalized there for a broken leg. He had a private suite, the works! For, how much? $45 a day. That’s cheaper than most backpacker’s here, and you get waited on hand and foot. I’m not sure if the sponge baths are included (ha ha). He met a young French girl there who had run out of money. The staff couldn’t get her to leave the hospital because it was so nice and I guess she’d been staying in some pretty crappy places. Anyway, I’m digressing from the point of my story.
In this hospital there is a morgue. And, in the morgue there are dead bodies. A lot of dead bodies. Why so many? It has to do with Fijian culture and their “traditions”. I use the word “tradition” loosely because Fijians tend to pick and choose among what they call a “tradition”. I’m not being condescending, this bit of information is important in setting up the story. Historically, the whole village (and thus extended family) would participate in a burial ceremony. In the present, Fijians are more spread out, so when someone dies, it’s not always possible for a relative to get back to the village soon after the death. This, of course, means the burial must be delayed.
What’s a Fijian to do? The solution. Just don’t pick the body up from the morgue. Yup, leave Grandpa Joe on the slab. There’s an overbooking at the morgue. Too many bodies and not enough slots. In addition, there isn’t enough staff to deal with the decaying corpses, so the nurses have to take up the slack. This is where another ingenious solution has been put into action. Because there are too many bodies for the ‘corpse coolers’, the nurses have started rotating them – 4 hours IN, 4 hours OUT. The mental image this creates up cracks me up. I know, I’m sick. The Pacific International Nursing Organization has offered to donate money to the hospital to make the morgue bigger, but the local nurses protested. A bigger morgue would mean more bodies and still not enough slots. The nurses weren’t willing to shuffle any more stiffs.
How does this tie into “traditions”? Well, the nurses have launched a major effort to end the body bag hotel scam. They tried charging for space, but the people picking up the bodies refused to pay and would take it anyway. (Tiny Indo-Fijian nurses can’t do much to stop a group of large Fijian men, or even larger Fijian women!) They can’t incinerate the body after a certain amount of time because they don’t have the means to do it. This problem has caused a big stink, and I don’t mean from decaying flesh. The Fijians claim that it’s tradition for the whole family to be present during a burial, so they HAVE to wait until everyone is present before burying the body. But, what did they do before refrigeration? Surely they didn’t let the body stink up the village while waiting for Aunt Bale to get back from the Mamanucas. It turns out that bodies were traditionally buried within a day or two of dying. So, this “new” tradition is really a twisting of an old tradition to make it fit.
Due to the crowding at the morgue, dead bodies are also stored in any other type of refrigerated container available. For example, a prominent vegetable distributor in Fiji lives just outside of Laotoka. People from near and far are constantly demanding that he let them store Uncle Harry in the vegetable cooler. And, he constantly refuses. A dead body next to the frozen asparagus would most likely lead to a hefty fine from the health inspection officer. Needless to say he’s been ostricized from the Fijian community. The way of life here is ‘you help me out and I’ll help you out’. Or, if you don’t help me out, I’ll bug the hell out of you, then give you the finger.
Ahh, Fiji. I still love it though! Don’t get me wrong.

P.S. I got the permit to take coral out of the country today. *Hooray!* Too bad it doesn’t say anything about RNA. I guess I’m just going to have to smuggle it out of the country in a latex glove shoved up my @. Ha ha! Just kidding, I’ll ‘hide’ it under the live coral and if questioned, lie.