The woman who washes the dead
January 12, 2017
The story of two women – a Palestinian Bedouin and a Syrian refugee – as one prepares the other for burial.
Lesbos, Greece – In the large one-room container in the quiet cemetery of Kato Tritos, a small town several kilometres from the capital of Lesbos, Warda Alkenawy prepares for the ritual body washing.
The 35-year-old Palestinian Bedouin from Herat, Israel, is a social worker and accidental washer of the dead who has been on the island since September 2015 – at the height of the mass influx of refugees .
Before her lie the bodies of Ghalia Abdi and her two young children, Zanaf and Walat. They were Kurds from Syria, and, like hundreds of thousands of others, were fleeing for their lives. Only their lives ended somewhere in the Aegean, between Turkey and Greece. Now they are here, on Warda’s wooden washing table.
Warda learned how to wash bodies by necessity.
She came to the island to work as a psychosocial therapist for the traumatised refugees arriving in their thousands every day, focusing in particular on unaccompanied children and those who had lost relatives along the way. Before she set foot on the island, she’d never washed a dead body.
There are two wooden tables inside the container room, one with slats for the water to run through. A long hose hangs from a single faucet, and a heavy white coffin sits pushed up against the wall. The white cloth used for shrouding the bodies is folded inside a small plastic bag at the foot of one table. Soon, Warda will remove the cloth and place it over Ghalia’s body. She will wash the body through the cloth, maintaining Ghalia’s privacy at all times. Shadia Abdi, Ghalia’s younger sister, who had fled to Greece three months before Ghalia, will help her.
