By Ezekiel Nabieu
Burial teams occasioned by Ebola have come in for lots of bashing and commendation depending on the person/s affected. Before now burials had been mainly family and private affairs with state and civic burials being the rare exceptions. But why are we so much concerned about our dead? You guessed it! It's nothing other than LOVE. We naturally never want to part from our loved ones forever. The methods of disposal of our dead can to some extent assuage the anguish of our souls. People would usually prefer funeral services and prayers with funeral or lying sermons followed by burials at which the ceremonies of earth to earth, ashes to ashes and dust to dust take place.
Talking about making a fuss over burial rites reminds me of Joseph of the Bible who by faith at the end of his life made mention of the exodus of the Israelites and gave directions concerning his funeral. Did it matter where he was buried? We do not have the details of the funeral process itself. These days the pomp of funerals feeds rather the vanity of the living than honor the dead. Fools flock to swell the show. And there are costly obsequies which are nothing but the affection of the living. In contrast it reminds me of the burial of Sir John Moore as related by Charles Wolfe: “Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, as his corpse to the rampart we hurried, not a soldier discharged his farewell shot o’er the grave where our hero we buried.” These days traffic is blocked for hours on end as burial processions capture the highways hampering even ambulances and the fire brigade but who cares in a country where even the president has complained about increasingly lawlessness?
Fleecing Burial teams
Let me help you out of the probable ambivalent meaning of this sub-headline. In this case I mean burial teams that fleece and not burial teams that are being fleeced. In fact there is little or no way of fleecing the burial team except by seizing their Personal Protective Equipment that are “Ebolalized” anyway.
Theirs is supposed to be a highly vulnerable craft. Literally at every step they have to fumigate along the way to corpses. Even the padlocks and the keys. And this is after wearing cumbersome equipment. It may be conjectured whether Ebola is not airborne because the eyes, noses and ears are covered even though these organs do not touch dead bodies. In that case it may not be so dangerous a disease as we may be imagining. This is borne out by the fact that no member of a burial team has ever contracted the disease. In spite of hundreds of burials that they have been carrying out they seem to be immune. Is the equipment a mere camouflage or is their immunity due to its effectiveness?
As a result of its low risk it is therefore not impelling that members of the teams should be involved in any dubious practices. This brings me to the case of a non-Ebola dead victim, whose body was forcefully removed by a burial team in spite of documentary evidence to the contrary, on the 1st October, 2014.
A 64-year-old man Patrick Sheku of Loko Town, Kissy who was a mason had been sick for three months during which he was being treated in a government hospital with all his prescription papers intact as well as his medical history. In spite of their explanation and documents they asked that the family pays them Le600, 000 (Six hundred thousand Leones) in order not to take the body away as an Ebola death. When the family said they could not afford it they asked for Le500,000 and Le 400,000 respectively. Amid protests from the family members they flung the body into their vehicle that already had other bodies. They then fumigated the room of the dead and drove away.
A member of the family said they were at their wits end at the behavior of the team who were expected to have been receiving risk allowances. He lamented that the late man who was a contractor was being deprived of a decent burial owing to rank corruption.
My take is that the recruitment process into the teams ought to be revisited. In the emergency situations of Ebola they seem to be consisting of sturdy rogues in their ranks besmearing an important arm of Ebola containment. It should be realized that since the end of the civil war there have been hundreds of unemployed convicts and ex-combatants with no humanity in their DNA. They should be brought to book.
They have also been notorious for the reckless way of disposal of the dead because of their sometimes drunken stupor.
With regard to my question of making a fuss over burials, let me say that it is very necessary for a loved one who separates from us probably forever, to be given a decent burial. No one knows the place of burial of the biblical Moses to this day but he was mourned.
QUESTION TIME
1. Why is Guinea said to be more effective in the containment of the EVD than Sierra Leone according to the BBC?
2. Where did non-health workers get the PPE with which they buried an Ebola victim in Koya Rural District?
3. How has government been ensuring that bye-laws are not in contravention of State Laws?
(C) Politico 09/10/14
