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 Editorials | Issues | February 2007 
In Death, Immigrants’ Return Home Matter of Culture
 K.O. Jackson - Journal Gazette
| | Being buried at home – surrounded by friends and family – isn’t the same for everyone. |
When Joe Weatu Boway dies, his wife of almost three years will decide where he will be buried.
A native of Liberia, Boway says his homeland’s funeral customs are different than in the United States, and he is not sure whether his wife will want to follow them.
“I haven’t given much thought about it, but it will be my wife’s decision and what she feels like doing,” says Boway, who leads the Fort Wayne Liberian Children’s Ministry at New Life Lutheran Church and is the father of an 18-month-old son.
As more immigrants live in the United States, their daily lives and silent mournful moments are also becoming part of American culture.
Being buried at home – surrounded by friends and family – isn’t the same for everyone.
“What we do there (in death) compared to here is that when a man dies, the women and children have to leave the village or remain in the house until the body is buried,” says Boway, who has lived in the U.S. since 1990 but makes annual trips to Liberia. “I am not sure why that is and I never asked, but it is our custom. I don’t know if my wife would want to be bothered with that.”
For some, burying a loved one in their native country can be a financial hardship; some times reaching into the thousands of dollars, says Rosa Gerra, who works with area Hispanics.
“It is a burden to send a love one back to their country. It costs a lot of money to send a body back home,” says Gerra, executive director of the Fort Wayne United Hispanic Americans Inc. “The entire community have gotten together to help send bodies back, but it is still a big financial hardship, yet most try to go back to their country.
“And the hardship isn’t just sending a body back, but if they wanted to come to America to attend a funeral, there is a lot of red tape family members have to go through to come here. Sometimes, it is a complicated mess.”
Body repatriation, sending an immigrant’s body back home, is a topic that has received attention in the past few years, including Nancy Savoca’s 2003 film “Dirt,” which chronicled an undocumented Salvadoran immigrant who died in the United States and wanted to be returned home. And with the number of immigrants coming to the U.S. each year, it is a topic that won’t soon go away.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 823 immigrants lived in Allen County between July 2003 and July 2004. The United Way of Allen County reports that about 4 percent of all Allen County residents were not born here but may die here.
In addition, more than 4,500 Hispanic immigrants’ bodies were sent to Mexico in 2005, costing more than $2 million, according to the office of Secretary of External Relations of Mexico.
To assist in offsetting the price to be buried in their homeland, which can reach as high as $10,000, many companies are selling phone cards and insurance.
Repatriar cards, a $10 phone card, are available to Mexican immigrants. The purchase of the card not only allows immigrants to phone home, but a portion of the card goes toward sending a customer’s body back to anywhere in Latin America. The coverage ranges from $1,000 to $10,000.
“Amigos spoke of this, but I don’t know anything about it,” says Fort Wayne resident Hector Garcia, as he stood outside George’s International Grocery. “It sounds good to me.”
Also available is an insurance certificate that can be bought for as low as $25 a year that will pay up to $4,000 to return a body home.
Since 2004, Pablo Kuqintana has operated Tu Tierra en Tus Manos (www.tutierraentusmanos.com), a business that allows immigrants to buy a certificate to make sure an immigrant’s remains are taken to their final resting place.
“It’s documented that 15,000 immigrants die in the U.S. each year, that’s 40 people a day,” Kuqintana says during a telephone interview from his Los Angles’ office. “We are trying to help solve the problem with the U.S. and Latino and American governments and get these people home.
“The cost is about $4,000, but that includes the U.S. (funeral) service, embalming of the body, the coffin, all the paperwork and shipping the body from any U.S. international airport to Mexico City to their home,” says Kuqintana, adding that his company works with 8,000 U.S. funeral homes to assist in getting legal and illegal immigrants’ bodies back home.
“People love to go back to their homeland to be buried. They might come here for a better life or job, but they still want to go back home with their family to be buried with their loved ones. They don’t want to end up here, where people may not know them or come visit (the cemetery). They want to go back home.
“It’s sad when they die here, and they can’t go back. People (back at home) don’t know about them or where they are. That’s very sad. That’s why we are here.”
Death customs vary from culture to culture, says David Misner, pastor of the Cedar Creek Church of Christ in Leo-Cedarville.
And although Misner hasn’t conducted a funeral for an immigrant, he believes “funerals are not for the deceased but for the living. It’s our way of saying goodbye, letting go and moving on.”
“There’s no right or wrong way or place to say goodbye. It’s a matter of choice. We (Americans) do things with our funerals that are part of our culture. And I think as we melt into the society we are becoming, we all have to be able to hold on to what we are and who we are, and that’s our culture and heritage.
“If a funeral doesn’t violate laws, we should accept them. We have people express their ethnic rituals when they get married; why shouldn’t we allow them to do the same in death? If a person wants to be buried in their home country, we should minimize the amount of red tape and make it possible for them to do so. Death, immigrants or not, is a grieving process, and we all have to learn to grieve.”
A church spokeswoman for the Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in Warsaw, which has a sizeable Hispanic congregation, says “rich or poor,” if a person wants to return back to their native land, “the larger community comes together to help send the body back. There are people who are here, who want to be celebrated here and remain here and some who want to return back to Mexico.”
Fort Wayne’s D.O. McComb & Sons Funeral Home has become a location many local immigrants come for funeral services, says Dave McComb, one of the funeral home’s owners.
As a result, he has learned a lot in handling funerals for immigrants.
“We have more than 90 languages spoken in this area alone,” McComb says. “We have a tremendous diversity here, and there are people who don’t think we do. They have funerals in the similar way we do,and then they have what they do in their culture.”
McComb says it can cost anywhere from $1,500 to more than $10,000 to send a body back to a person’s home country.
“What we have noticed is that if it is the first generation, they are more than likely to want to go back home, but the second generations and later, are more adapt to have more family and friends here and be buried here.
“The thing we have to do is to meet the challenge and do the best we can for all religions and cultures.”
Madeline Baker, a Catholic Asian-American, has lived in Japan and South Korea. Her mother is buried in Korea, and her father lives in Alaska.
But Baker has no plans of returning to either Japan or South Korea to be buried.
“I’ve been here for a while,” the executive director of the Fort Wayne Early Childhood Alliance says, “and I talked it over with my children, I want to be cremated.
“In my country, the body isn’t held in a funeral home. It is brought home and people come by for two or three days to pay respect. The body is never left alone, and someone, usually a brother, is always carefully watching over the body.”
kjackson@jg.net |
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