Masaka Regional Referral Hospital is not a place to bid life fare thee well, as friends and relatives may never identify their loved one beyond two days of their passing on.

One has an extra reason to thank one's stars for seeking medical treatment at Masaka Regional Referral Hospital and go away alive and cured. To die at the hospital presents a certain risk.

If you visit the hospital without the knowledge of your friends or relatives and are unfortunate to die there, it might take them time to know what happened and by then your dead body could already be buried in some unmarked and undignified grave in some obscure place. The hospital has no place for keeping dead bodies beyond two or three days.

The little dilapidated house that passes as a mortuary for Masaka Regional Referral Hospital. PHOTOS BY MICHAEL J. SSALI

According to Ms Winnie Sserwanja, a senior hospital administrator, the small piece of land measuring perhaps half an acre next to what passes as a mortuary for the hospital where the unclaimed bodies are buried is actually supposed to be a residential area for hospital staff. It is not a Municipal Council land and was never planned for burying the dead.

On that piece of land, graves are dug on top of other graves every now and again to bury and get rid of the ever growing number of decomposing bodies. With more agitation for hospital staff housing, this unofficial graveyard where hundreds of people have been buried is targeted to be cleared in the not so distant future for housing development.

Nevertheless, every resident in this region or travelling through Masaka is at risk of ending up in any one of such undignified graves. Masaka Referral Hospital is the largest health facility in southern Uganda and is located along the Kampala-Mbarara highway, which has become notoriously prone to traffic accidents in the recent years, resulting in hundreds of victims being rushed to the hospital where some of them actually die.

The Good Samaritans who normally "come to the rescue" of the victims most times steal their wallets where in some cases identity cards are also lost. Since some people carry no identity cards or any other identification documents, when they die in such circumstances, it takes their relatives a long time to know what could have befell them.

At Masaka Regional Referral Hospital dead bodies are taken to a little dilapidated house just outside the northern fence of the hospital. It has no refrigeration, its roof leaks, and most of its glass windows are broken, allowing rats, wild cats and birds in. The bodies are merely placed on the floor and the place has no facilities for doctors to carry out a proper post-mortem. This is also the place where the police take unidentified murder victims and others killed in road accidents.

But Sserwanja says, "As a hospital, we want to get rid of dead bodies as soon as possible. They are waste and a mortuary is a storage and disposal item. It is like a skip where the waste is kept temporarily before it is gotten rid of by perhaps burying or burning."

She was however quick to mention that traditionally our society gives a lot of respect to the dead and it is important for relatives and the bereft to take home their dead to give them a befitting burial.

Ms Sserwanja goes on to disclose that the hospital administration has all along asked the government to construct a decent mortuary to no avail. "Recently, this place became a medical school for training doctors under Kampala International University (KIU) and they need dead bodies for pathological studies but we have nowhere to keep the bodies for a long time. A team from the university headquarters in Kampala visited us recently and there is a likelihood that they will construct a facility soon but I am not sure when that might happen."

The present little house can only accommodate a few dead bodies at a time. It is also hard to keep any bodies for longer than three days as they decompose and the stench becomes unbearable. The place has got to be cleaned of the oozing blood and other liquids from the dead bodies and it is expensive to keep the place tidy and disinfected.

So when a body is not claimed after two days or so, the hospital calls upon Masaka Municipal Council to take it away and bury it.

"These days however when we ask them to come they don't and we oblige our own employees to take over the disposal of the bodies." The employees make some shallow graves, hardly two feet deep, and it's in those that the unclaimed bodies are buried. She also said that Masaka Municipality is responsible for the construction of a mortuary since they are responsible for waste disposal.

It was not possible to get a comment from Masaka Town Clerk Mr. Nick Rwegira because he was said to be on a working trip overseas. However, Ms Sarah Nakyanzi, a member of Masaka Municipality Council Health and Education Committee, said that construction of a new mortuary was on top of the Municipality Council agenda but it was the funds that were not forth coming. "We have also asked our Town Planner, Sarapino Oyok Olet, to identify a place at Kamilampango for the burial of unclaimed dead bodies. We are still waiting for his report."

Masaka Municipal Speaker, Denis Majwala Lukanga said that at the moment the municipality is unable to remove the dead bodies from the little house outside the hospital fence when the hospital calls for their removal. "We don't have a single functioning vehicle. We have no ambulance and the tractor that we used before to take them away broke down. UN Habitat offered to pay for its repair and it is still under repair in Kampala."