Twins put their mark on coffin-making business
It is a lot of work and sometimes mi get fed up and say mi would leave it, but I set goals for myself and I haven’t achieved all of them yet.
Twin sisters Colleen and Nadine Whyte are not afraid of getting themselves dirty, so on any given day they can be seen at 72 Oxford Street in downtown Kingston making coffins. The 49- year- olds have been putting final touches to burial boxes for close to three decades.
The sisters say they take no pleasure in the job they do, but noted that it is the way they earn their keep.
“Sometimes I will go to the bank to change a cheque or something, and because I am sometimes dirty, people will turn up their nose and look at mi like I am mad, but I don’t pay them any mind,” Nadine said.
“I don’t like when people die but this is what we do for a living. When our mom passed away we had to make hers and that was really sad,” said Nadine, the first of the sisters to start in the coffinmaking business.
On any given work day and their crew would labour over coffins, doing tasks such as filling, sanding, puttying and upholstering. The finished products are then sold to funeral homes in the corporate area.
“It is a lot of work and sometimes mi get fed up and say mi would leave it, but I set goals for myself and I haven’t achieved all of them yet,” said Colleen.
The restrictions imposed on funerals and burials by the Government has made work a bit harder, Nadine said.
“It is a lot of work now because funeral are keeping during the week now. Originally, it was only weekend so we could get a day or two to rest, but what you find now is that because funerals are not allowed on weekends, we have to building every day. We get tired at times, but we don’t stop, we are always working,” she said.
The sisters are quick to point out that a lot of persons do not readily gravitate to the trade because it is highly labour intensive and scarcely glamorous.
“Nuff a di youth dem nuh inna dem hard work here. Dem rather find other tings do. Mi willing to teach, and one time we use to have all three a dem a work with us, but some a dem a other tings dem deh pon. My sister teach mi the trade whe she learn from her fren dem, and mi glad. Mi never regret it at all,” Colleen. said.