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Zimbabwe morgues overflowing

"We have decided to donate the bodies because of serious overcrowding that has affected our cooling system."

Dr. Chris Tapfumaneyi, medical superintendent of Harare Central Hospital

Zimbabwe's economic disaster is horrifyingly evident in the morgue at Harare Central Hospital, packed to more than three times capacity with the dead that relatives can't afford to bury.

With mortality rates continuing to spiral out of control, hospital officials said Friday they have no choice but to give dozens of the bodies to the city's medical school to help ease the crisis.

"We have decided to donate the bodies because of serious overcrowding that has affected our cooling system," said Dr. Chris Tapfumaneyi, the hospital's medical superintendent.

The morgue, designed for 164 corpses, holds nearly 600.

Trays in the morgue often hold more than one adult body, along with the tiny corpses of infants. Others, shrouded in canvas and cotton sheets, lie in gurneys or on the floors of the refrigerated corridors.

Some of the unclaimed cadavers were those of vagrants found dead on the streets, Tapfumaneyi said.

Others were the victims of violence kept for as long as three years during police investigations, which are often delayed by fuel shortages and logistics problems amid Zimbabwe's worst political and economic crisis since independence in 1980.

Most of the other corpses were awaiting collection by impoverished relatives, many of whom "just disappear and abandon them" in hopes they will be given decent "paupers' burials" by the city, Tapfumaneyi said.

But in a nation plagued by a hunger crisis and an estimated 5,000 AIDS-related deaths a week, funeral homes hired to bury the unclaimed dead are overwhelmed.

At the same time, city authorities have run out of money and gasoline, paralyzing ambulance, garbage collection and other services.

Zimbabwe is suffering massive inflation and unemployment. A hard currency shortage has led to further shortages of food, medicines and fuel, which in turn have crippled industry.

A routine burial -- including cemetery and grave fees, a casket and transportation -- costs at least 100,000 Zimbabwe dollars, or US$120 at the official exchange rate or less than US$40 at the black market rate.

That is twice the average Zimbabwean's annual income and is well out of the reach of the 70 percent of people here living in poverty. Most rural poor bury their dead on family plots in the bush, following African spiritual traditions that require the dead to be buried.

As the Harare municipal cemeteries filled with AIDS victims in recent years, a raft of suggestions -- for mass graves, for bodies to be buried vertically, and for cremation -- were met with outcry by political and tribal leaders.

White Zimbabweans of those of Indian descent favor cremation, but in June, Harare's cash-strapped city council ran out of imported inflammable gas for the furnaces at its only crematorium.

Since then, private funeral homes have accumulated nearly 100 bodies due for cremation. A few bodies have been taken to the second city of Bulawayo's diesel-fired crematorium.

But diesel fuel, like regular gasoline, is also in short supply, and Bulawayo's ordinances make it difficult to cremate a person who did not live there.

Leaders of Harare's tiny Hindu community, meanwhile, have said they are considering waiving strict religious rules to allow non-Hindus to be cremated in their small diesel-fired crematorium here.

Tapfumaneyi said his hospital's donation of 42 cadavers to the medical school was the first for at least three years.

Medical students of anatomy in the past received some bodies voluntarily "donated to science" by individuals in their wills.

Tapfumaneyi said his hospital was now responding to an appeal from the medical school for unclaimed cadavers.

From the first shipment, the Zimbabwe University medical school will choose those suitable for teaching purposes and promised proper burial of their remains afterward.
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