By Bampia James Bundu
Grave diggers and funeral home owners have expressed disappointment at what they referred to as “stagnation in our businesses because almost every death is now being classified as an Ebola death”.
In an exclusive interview with Politico, Amadu Kanu, a grave digger at the Kissy Road Cemetery in Freetown said that they were faced with serious challenges for the past few months as most of the corpses were being buried by the Ebola team “leaving us with absolutely nothing to do”.
He said it had been very difficult for them to raise cash, adding: “we make money when there are corpses and we are hired to dig graves. People give us collections for digging graves and for taking care of them”.
Kanu pointed out that the Ebola outbreak had caused most of his colleagues to stop working for fear of contacting the virus. “We survived by handling dead bodies. The more people die the more jobs we get and the more money we make”, he said, pointing out that with Ebola, people die but they could not bury them because of the risk involved.
He pleaded with the government and the international community to put more effort into the fight against Ebola, “because if it continues like this, things will be more difficult for not only most of us but also for all Sierra Leoneans”.
Santigie Sesay, a coffin maker at Kissy Road, east of Freetown observed that their business, which had been very successful before the epidemic broke out in the country, was now so slow that he could hardly sell more than two coffins a week.
“We used to sustain ourselves with monies we make from the sale of these coffins but all that has changed lately”, he complained. He said most people who had deposited monies with them as advance payments for coffins had come to collect their monies back. He added that they were faced with a serious challenge of how to sell the stock they had, noting that most of the people who deposited for coffin had collected their money.
Whiles acknowledging the role of the government and the international community in fighting the disease out of the country and the sub-region as a whole, the coffin maker noted that much more needed to be done because many families had already fallen apart.
“If Ebola continues in Sierra Leone up to December some of us will go out of business. Business is very slow rite now because people do not buy coffins and we have to feed our families or pay back other customers who changed their minds”, he said.
An undertaker at the Sierra Leone public mortuary at Connaught hospital, Femi John, said that they had been banned from receiving corpses from the public, adding that they only accommodated corpses that died of other causes at the hospital or those that died in accidents. Even those bodies had to be brought to them by the police.
He said they had less work to do at the moment as “there are only a few corpses in our cold rooms”. He said their greatest challenge was to identify and separate corpses brought to them, adding that they were at risk of accepting Ebola corpses.
John said an instant case was when they accommodated a boy who had died at the hospital and was later said to have died of the virus. He said they lacked protective gears, which were only available to the burial teams.
“All we have are gloves for our hands. It is only by the grace of God that we survive here and only Him can continue to protect us”, John said.
Senior mortician at the Freetown Funeral Services, Alusine Kamara, told Politico that their operations had slowed down since the state of public health emergency was declared.
“Management has decided to desist from accepting corpses from the public except those that come with certificates from the ministry of health or the World Health Organisation”, he said adding that owing to those challenges, they had to close the home until the state of emergency was lifted and the country declared Ebola-free.
© Politico 30/10/14
