My brother’s death pushed me to mortuary job

By Emanuel Were  

NAIROBI, KENYA: As the number of funeral homes and hospital mortuaries in the country increase, so has been the demand for experts in the field.

And this perhaps explains why Eric Ogada’s services have been in great demand.

Ogada, 63, is an external trainer in mortuary science whose specialty is training mortuary attendants.

Ogada says that although morturay attendants are usually stigmatised as they regarded as people “living off the dead,” their profession is like any other.

“People think it is a place where you get money from the dead. But it is not,” Ogada said.

“When you have prepared a body well, relatives give you a token of appreciation. This also happens in the developed world.”

Outbreak of infection

Although people in the profession are treated as pariahs, Ogada argues that a well-trained mortuary attendant is very important in any society.

“When there is an outbreak of an infection, we can lose so many people because the mortuary attendants are not doing a good job,” Mr Ogada said.

The mortuary attendant can act as a carrier for the disease through vomit, faeces or blood borne disease such as hepatitis. 

The story of how Ogada joined the profession is one of an opportunity coming at a ‘dark moment.’

In 1989, his brother passed away and Ogada was not exactly pleased with the way the mortuary attendants prepared his body for the funeral.

“They used formalin and the whole body was black. This disturbed me so much,” said Ogada

After the incident, Ogada, then working as a lab technician at Kenyatta National Hospital, requested to be transfer to the mortuary.

“At that time, being posted to work at the mortuary was considred punishment,” he said.

His family supported his change of jobs.

“It was not a surprise to them that I decided to do the work because in the lab we used to handle specimens taken from dead people. My wife had no objections and my children are very proud of me,” he said.

And unlike most newcomers in the profession, Ogada says he was not scared handling his first corpse.

 “But with time it became more stressful so I listen to music in the mortuary or I read a verse from the bible after preparing a body.”

He adds that there are times when bodies brought to the mortuaries can be in a terrifying state and one has to be strong-willed to handle them.

“Bodies of people who died in the sea can especially be scary. You must have a strong heart to do the job,” Ogada said.

This is perhaps the reason why the job was left to those who didnt have training in any field. 

But this started changing in the late 90s when hospitals started sponsoring mortuary attendants to go for training.

Ogada was among the first beneficiaries of a scholarship to undertake a certificate course in mortuary science at the Victoria Institute of Forensic Medicine in Australia.

He has fond memories of his time in Australia.

“They were assuming I had not worked in a mortuary before so they played a prank on me. One of them pretended he dead and I was supposed to check whether he is indeed dead,” Ogada said. “When I started to check, I saw an eye blinking.”

In course, he learned forensic pathology and scientific testing of specimens to determine toxins found in the body.

Toxicology report

“The developed world is far ahead with advanced equipment where a toxicology report can be done and results known in 72 hours,” he said.

He laments that most of the labs in the country do not have the necessary equipment and sometimes samples have to be sent out of the country for testing.

He, however, says preservation of the bodies in the mortuaries has improved over the years.