At 24, Ewurabena Quartey has a job most people her age would run from. She's a mortician and hearse driver in Ghana's Central Region — believed to be the youngest in the area. And she's been doing it for seven years.
She studied Hospitality Management in tertiary school before she decided to follow her parents into the funeral business. Now she picks up bodies at midnight, prepares them for burial, and drives the hearse. “People die at any time. When they do, families are often too afraid to keep the body at home until morning. So around midnight or 2am, someone can knock on your door to say they've brought a body,” she told BBC News Pidgin.
But not everything about the job is easy. “Sometimes people arrive with their eyes open because their families were too afraid to close them. Others come with their mouths still open. That's the scary part. Apart from that, you don't really see anything disturbing,” she said.
Ewurabena lives right next to where the bodies are kept — her bedroom is about seven steps away. She says she sleeps well and has never seen a ghost, even though she believes they exist. “I sleep well, I wake well, and nothing happens to me. When I undertake, I don't see them in my dreams. I make sure they look elegant and presentable, and I can't even remember the faces I've seen,” she said.
One practice she insists on is knocking before entering the room where a body is kept. “In Ghana, before you enter someone’s house, you knock, and they respond. So when we knock on their door, it's not because we expect a response. We know they're no longer alive. We knock to maintain the respect they had when they were alive. We shouldn't discard that respect simply because they've passed,” she explained.
“If you accidentally step on them, you say sorry. If you're bathing them or turning them and you make a mistake, you say, ‘Sorry,’ because you must treat them with respect.”
The biggest challenge she faces isn't the dead — it's the living. Society looks down on her because of her job. “Sometimes when someone asks if I'm in a relationship and I say yes, the reaction they give me suggests they feel I have no right to have one,” she said. People are also surprised she's educated, speaks good English, and dresses well. “You can be a mortician and smell nice. You can be a mortician and speak good English. People think those of us who work in the mortuary have no right to dress well or present ourselves properly.
But we have every right to do everything that everyone else does,” she said.
But she has a support system. “Fortunately, I have genuine people around me who stick by me. Some even want to learn about what I do and tell me to rest while they take over. So there's fun in it, and it's a good life,” she added.
The work isn't steady. Some weeks she handles more than five bodies; other months she gets none. “It fluctuates. It isn't stable,” she said.
Ewurabena believes the dead protect her because she treats them with dignity. “I believe they protect me and mean me well because I don't disrupt them and they don't disrupt me,” she said.