September 2017 was a month that will be forever marked with sadness on the island of Puerto Rico. Hurricane
Maria decimated the island, and the
aftermath that followed was unspeakable.
For Lucy Giboyeaux, it hit particularly hard. Although she is a
Cleveland resident, most of her family is from Puerto Rico, and she has many
family members still there. She remembers vividly calling to check on them only
to find all of the phones were down and waited
to hear that everyone was okay. But for Lucy, that time period wasn’t just about helping her relatives find
assistance. She had customers that had become family there, depending on her
for solutions to their mortuary needs, and they just
didn’t know where to begin.
Lucy has always wanted to help people from Spanish-speaking
countries, and that’s what brought
her to NMS in the first place. More than ten years ago she responded to an ad
looking for bilingual help for National
Mortuary Shipping, and although she knew nothing about the mortuary industry,
she knew she could help. She responded
to the ad and replied, and at the end of the interview she bluntly asked: “So, when do I start?” Of that fateful
interview, Lucy says, “I just knew that I could help
and that this was the job for me.”
The job was, indeed, hers. And the rest was history. In the
beginning, selling mortuary shipping services in Spanish-speaking countries
wasn’t an easy task. “I learned
everything from the relationships I was building. I didn’t know the words for all of the
industry terms that we use, so I had to rely on my friends that worked for the
businesses I was talking to for the right way to say certain things.” Finally, after about five years of searching, Lucy found a Spanish language book on
embalming, and she was able to understand
some of the more complicated terms she was struggling with. It wasn’t long until
Lucy was the foremost expert in mortuary shipping for many Spanish-speaking
countries.
She now serves countries in Central and South America and has many customers in Mexico and Puerto Rico. She feels a tremendous sense of pride in
helping her customer avoid the frustration that a language barrier can bring
for a Spanish speaker. She always wanted
to help. And during that tumultuous
month of September 2017, she got that
opportunity.
“I had a customer who had a son in Florida who had
passed away. They were trying to get
his body back to Puerto Rico. I couldn’t
reach them for several days, and then I finally got a call, and they said that they had to travel 45
minutes just to get to a working
phone. They did that every day. They traveled
45 minutes every day just to get an update on their son’s remains.”
With no power and limited resources, their son’s
remains had to stay in Florida for an
extended period. The hurricane wasn’t just causing problems
for mortuary clients on the island, it
was causing problems in the states too.
When those bodies had to be refrigerated for long periods of time, funeral
homes were running out of room to store the bodies. Lucy and the team at NMS found a solution by
working with crematoriums around the country to accommodate the issue of long-term body storage. Thanks to that type of off-the-cuff problem
solving, the body was returned to the concerned family, and they were able to
memorialize their son without worry.
Being able to speak in the native tongue of a
customer helps to relieve stress during
a difficult time. For Lucy, it is a
service that she is proud to provide for NMS.
Each country has different rules in place for handling bodies and
embalming. The paperwork is
different. When you are a funeral
director and you are already struggling
to understand the process, you need someone who can speak to you in your
language to help get you the answers you need as clearly as they can be delivered.
Here at NMS, we deliver to customers all over the world. If you are
looking for a bi-lingual company to assist your funeral home in taking care of
mortuary shipping to any country, contact the team at NMS. We help take care of the details, whether
there is a disaster or not, so that you
can focus on the families you serve.
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