An $8,000 Bill To Pay
Before He Rests In Peace
Anthony Reinhart, Globe
and Mail
TORONTO — After working
each day to build houses
he couldn't afford,
Alvaro Vargas Fonseca
would lay his body down
in a small, rented room
in Toronto.
Today, Mr. Fonseca's
corpse lies at a
west-end funeral home,
in a lonely state of
limbo, where it will
stay until someone pays
$8,000 to send it home
to Costa Rica.
Mr. Fonseca, 38, was
among the estimated
20,000 illegal
immigrants working in
greater Toronto's
construction industry
when a heart attack
felled him on a
Mississauga job site on
Feb. 25.
With no loved ones in
Canada to claim him, it
fell to his landlady,
Cristina Carballo, to
have his body taken to a
funeral home while she
conferred by telephone
with his distraught
relatives in the Central
American country.
Trouble is, neither Ms.
Carballo nor Mr.
Fonseca's family can
afford the $8,000 cost
to send his remains
home.
The situation is
particularly distressing
to Ms. Carballo, who now
finds herself on a
financial hook for a
second time for trying
to do right by Mr.
Fonseca.
The first time was in
July of 2006, when she
borrowed $2,000 in cash
and put up $6,000
against the value of her
modest Toronto home to
bail Mr. Fonseca out of
immigration detention,
where he was awaiting
deportation. She had
never met him, but had
learned of his plight
though her brother, an
acquaintance.
Upon Mr. Fonseca's
release, Ms. Carballo
rented him a room in her
basement for $400 a
month, while he worked
as a framer and chipped
away at the paperwork to
obtain legal status.
Since Mr. Fonseca's
death 10 days ago, she
has asked Citizenship
and Immigration Canada
to return the $2,000 in
bail money so that she
can apply it to the cost
of shipping his remains,
but was told she must
first provide a death
certificate - then wait,
possibly months - for
her request to wind
through the bureaucracy.
"I just want to help,"
said Ms. Carballo, 45,
who came legally to
Canada from El Salvador
20 years ago and now
runs her own beauty
salon. A single mother
of three, she
sympathized with Mr.
Fonseca, who was sending
money home to his three
children.
His co-workers at a
Brampton-based
contracting firm have
set up a fund in hopes
of covering the body
transport costs, to
which Local 183 of the
Labourers' International
Union of North America
has made a "substantial
donation," Michael
O'Brien, a union
official, said
yesterday.
Roger Nair, a customer
and friend of Ms.
Carballo, has also come
to her aid. Mr. Nair,
who runs a film
production company and,
by coincidence, is
working on a project
about the hidden lives
of refugees in Toronto,
has arranged for a
lawyer to make inquiries
with the immigration
department, free of
charge, on her behalf.
A Citizenship and
Immigration department
spokesman, citing
privacy rules, declined
to comment on Mr.
Fonseca's case.
Beyond the specifics of
government policy, Mr.
Nair finds sad irony in
what he sees as a lack
of official concern for
the fate of the dead
man's remains, or for
Ms. Carballo, whose only
motive was to help
another human being.
"The Canadian government
would have stepped up to
the plate to deport this
guy in two seconds, and
sent him back and paid
for his flight," Mr.
Nair said. "Now the guy
is dead, so what are we
doing? Are we just going
to leave him to rot?"
Ms. Carballo, who could
have walked away but
chose not to, is
"actually getting
penalized for helping
someone."
As for Canada, Mr. Nair
struggled with
disquieting thoughts
about a country that so
often fancies itself a
paragon of decency in a
cold world.
"I take it that we have
become so
uncompassionate about
people around us," he
said. "We don't see that
everybody's got a life,
and they have a family,
and we can't see beyond
our noses.
"We're a well-to-do
country. I don't think
it's right." |
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