Homeless gravedigger lives among the dead - 70-y-o has nowhere to call home

Chad Bryan, Gleaner Writer

Weariness and frustration occupied the visage of 70-year-old gravedigger Samuel Cunningham, as he recounted tales of the graves he has dug for well-known Jamaicans and the scant regard with which he has been treated over the years. He is currently homeless, living in a cemetery among the dead.

Dressed in khaki and sporting an unkempt hairstyle and a pen behind his left ear, the elderly man carried a metal cane to ease the pressure on his aching feet.

As he sat at the foot of a grave covered by shrubbery in the May Pen Cemetery along Spanish Town Road in Kingston, he reluctantly offered information on his life and work as he is of the firm belief that nothing would be done to help improve his situation.

Cunningham, who hails from western Jamaica, has been digging graves for more than 25 years. He left the life he knew in rural Westmoreland and headed to Kingston in search of work in the 1980s.

Cunningham has not always been a gravedigger. He first started doing carpentry and other forms of "hustling", then transitioned into the gravedigging business, which he told The Gleaner has only been able to afford him food.

ROUGH WORK

"Gravedigging is rough work. No money not in gravedigging. Of late, I haven't been digging. I have to enjoy it because that's how I get my food," he said.

Cunningham said he has dug more than 100 graves, including that of late cultural icons Louise 'Miss Lou' Bennett-Coverley and her husband Eric, as well as those of Bishop Mallica 'Kappo' Reynolds, and former prime ministers Hugh Shearer and Michael Manley.

"I never go to these funerals. I just dig and help build and then leave. It was the same with all of them. I start early morning and then dig and leave," he said.

However, he expressed that he got more ratings for his actions than he got money in his pocket.

"Is pure ratings I get and no money. Is not any big money to the type of dignitaries that died. I should have gotten more, but you know that the sufferer never get anything," he said.

Cunningham is in desperate need of a proper dwelling. He lives among the dead in a dilapidated house in a forlorn section of the May Pen Cemetery plagued by thieves, who disturb the dead by removing gold handles from their coffins.

Town clerk at the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation, Robert Hill, when asked about Cunningham and his plight said that he was hearing about this for the first time, and that something should be done to help him.

"I am very unfamiliar with the case. I would have to go and investigate it to see how best we can deal with it. We [will] have to refer that to Poor Relief," Hill said.