US Sailor From Haiti Longs for Loved Ones

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Jan. 23) -- Amid the long hours spent preparing meals for sailors on a U.S. navy vessel just miles off the Haitian shore, Natalia Maxius wonders what happened to loved ones just out of reach.

Maxius, who left Haiti six years ago with her mother and siblings, still has many close friends and family on the quake-ravaged island.

However shortly after the carrier deployed to Haiti, the 21-year-old culinary specialist seaman received word that a life-long family friend, a surrogate mother of sorts, was killed when a church collapsed on her during last week's quake that some estimate has killed up to 200,000.

Staring into her hands and speaking in soft, reserved tones, Maxius recalls fond memories of Ninive Desir, her mother's best friend for 50 years.

"Because my mother worked two jobs to support us while we lived in Haiti, Ninive used to watch us after school every day. She was the only person my mother would trust to care for us," said Maxius.

Hoping to give her children a better life than most living in the impoverished community of Carrefour neighboring the Haitian capital, her mother put all three of her children in private school. But when Haiti erupted in political violence in 2004, Maxius said armed gangs threatened to kill her and her brothers for attending private school, prompting her mother to take her children to the United States.

It was with heavy hearts that Maxius and her family left behind Haiti and their close friend from Carrefour. Now six years later, she's dealing with the even greater sorrow of knowing her mother lost her best friend.

"When my mother called me she didn't want to tell me at first. She just just kept crying and saying 'she's gone, she's gone.'"

Sadder still, Desir's own children are in Canada and have been unable to return to give their mother a proper burial.

"They just dug a hole and dumped her in it," said Maxius, gazing downward and pausing for a moment before continuing. "They may never know where she is."

Like so many others, Desir likely wound up buried in one of numerous mass graves on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, where bodies of quake victims are dumped by the truckload into large pits and covered, the dead neither identified nor revered. Fear of disease from decomposing corpses has forced authorities to dispose of bodies in ways that would otherwise be unimaginable.

Among Haitians who practice a mixture of Christianity and voodoo beliefs, the proper burial of loved ones is essential to the well-being of the dead in the afterlife. The faithful here believe that those with a well-marked final resting place can still commune with the living, offering them guidance in the living world and solace about life after death.

Without that, the thousands killed and buried without ceremony, like Desir, are mired in spiritual darkness -- a hard reality for mourners like Maxius, who day after day carries on the arduous task of feeding thousands of sailors tasked with helping distribute aid to Haitians left starving and homeless.

And all the while she wonders whether other loved one might have been lost.