Right then. Try explaining to the Brits that we’re not cannibals. That Cypriots don’t eat human hearts. It’s just that the pathologists employed by our state services can’t pinpoint what caused someone’s sudden death with any certainty, so they have to extract samples from the deceased’s heart for a biopsy. Sometimes the whole heart.
But we don’t have histopathologists to do this work either, so the samples—or entire organs—get shipped off to England. Which, as it happens, has its own problems, meaning a single biopsy takes months to complete.
But before you can explain any of this, the story’s already doing the rounds across Britain and Cyprus (and probably beyond): “Family of British man who died in Cyprus discover his heart is missing when they receive his body“. It sounds macabre. Grand Guignol.
And off we go with the speculation and theories, whilst his loved ones are thrown into a maelstrom searching for answers when all they needed was a simple heads-up.
How hard would it have been to inform the family from the start, before the heart was even removed from the body?
How do you explain to people who don’t live in this place that things which seem—and perhaps are—straightforward everywhere else range from complicated to completely impossible in Cyprus?
How do you explain, for instance, that whilst in their country they’ve had speed cameras monitoring traffic violations since they were born, Cyprus needed decades of discussions to install them and then placed them in locations that achieve nothing except generating fines from which the operating company takes its cut?
In other words, the aim isn’t preventing accidents—the results show anything but a reduction anyway.
How do you explain that we can’t find an acceptable formula for teacher evaluations? That we reformed local government to reduce the number of councils and make services more agile but achieved precisely the opposite?
That getting a building permit takes months or even years, whilst the minister constantly assures us it’s a matter of days? How do you explain that a court case can drag on for five, six, or seven years before it’s heard?
How do you explain that living somewhere and actually loving it are two different things, as that old tourism slogan used to put it?
Because in this particular case, before their loved one died and before the post-mortems, they probably had the impression that this was a gorgeous island where everything’s practically idyllic.
