– City councillor bemoans practice

FORMER Mayor Patricia Chase-Green on Monday called out the practice by funeral parlours to build and leave tombs in the cemetery, and urged instead that the tombs be constructed the day before or day of the funeral.

“No funeral parlour should build tombs and leave them there, like a hotel waiting for guests,” Chase-Green commented. She was speaking at the fortnightly statutory meeting of the Mayor and City Council (M&CC) at City Hall.

The issue came up for discussion when Councillor Ivelaw Henry stood to say that he doesn’t agree with the Central Board of Health that City Hall should now overlook the construction of tombs.

The ‘Health Board’ believes that the construction of tombs and the like should come under the remit of City Hall, but Councillor Henry has said that the City Council will have to look at cost and other factors.

“The Council will bear a bigger cost if it has to move now to do what the funeral homes are doing, because they will have to incur other costs,” Henry said. “Right now, they do not have to pay NIS, PAYE, for people to do it. So now if you have that in- house, you will have to meet all those costs,” he told Guyana Chronicle.

“They are telling us that certain conditions must be maintained, and that they no longer believe that it should be done by these funeral homes; that City Hall must now start looking at it for itself. We have to do a cost benefit analysis,” he added.

Meanwhile, the deplorable state of tombs within Le Repentir Cemetery poses a grave public health issue for residents living in communities nearby.

The City Council had called on persons whose relatives have been buried at the location to visit City Hall to discuss the way forward in terms of rehabilitating broken tombs. In some cases, the bones of the dead are visible, while sections of the cemetery are water-logged.
City Hall had in the past worked on a programme whereby relatives of those who are buried at the cemetery were invited to talk with officials about the repair of their relatives’

tombs.
Though City Hall had not budgeted for the programme, the Council sought donations from civil society and the business community to forge ahead with the programme.
“…No responsible council could sit idly by and allow a cemetery to continue to exist like that in almost the middle of the city; this is the capital!” the M&CC said.

Under the Municipal and District Council Act 28:01, the Council has the responsibility for establishing, maintaining and controlling burial grounds and crematoriums. In addition, the Office of the Sexton has burial registers which contain the names of persons buried, the dates of burials, and the locations of the places of burial within the cemetery. Burial registers often serve as an important resource for genealogy.

Le Repentir Cemetery was first established in March 1861. Subsequently, a road was constructed through the cemetery to link La Penitence with Lodge, Wortmanville and Werk-en-Rust. The first person interred at Le Repentir Cemetery was Antonio Gonzales, 45, on March 15, 1861. He was from Madeira, Portugal.