Death as a Teacher

Death here is a sadly common thing.  Yet despite the frequency of students being absent for deaths in the family, I still hadn’t had a terribly up-close encounter with how the people here deal with it in terms of rituals.  The closest I’d come was a couple of visits to the students’ houses in the days following their loss, as the family did what I would most compare to Jews sitting shivah.  Until yesterday.

During lunch, the entire student body suddenly dashed across the field towards the road because “somebody just died.”  We got to the road in time to watch a pickup truck fly past filled with people screaming.  All the girls took off sprinting after it like their lives depended on it.  One of the kids informed me that a student’s mother had just died, that the truck held her body, and that the people were going to her house.  I followed them to pay my respects and support my student.  During the experience that followed, I learned (or re-realized) a great deal about the culture here in South Sudan:

Word travels fast:  I have absolutely no idea how 100 kids simultaneously knew that a corpse was about to pass the school and exactly who had just died and how.  (Needless to say, they don’t have cell phones.)

People are what matters:  There were well over 200 people gathered at the woman’s home within minutes of the arrival of the body.  The adults and elderly literally ran from wherever they were, pouring into the compound from every direction of the surrounding “bush” (forest), and the kids didn’t give a second thought to immediately leaving school.  No one cared about anything in the world but supporting the family of the deceased.  They literally dropped whatever they had in their hands and came.

Dealing with death is personal:  In America, when someone dies, the next of kin are spared a lot of the “messier” aspects of dealing with the body.  Here, it’s strictly a family affair.  The family members carried the deceased around the property simply on a sheet while friends processed after it.  The women formed a circle to shield the body and used buckets of water and their hands to wash it, while the men constructed (out of branches) a tent to use for a sort of wake.  The men in the community dug a hole for burial in the middle of the woman’s yard to lay her alongside the others who’ve passed in their family (there are no cemeteries, so each family creates their own).

Community = family: The family of the deceased, obviously devastated by the sudden death of their loved one, mourned deeply, loudly, and with much movement.  As I tried hard not to stare, I thought to myself, “if my mom died, I would not want the entire town watching me just after I found out.”  In the States, the deepest mourning is done in private, alone or strictly with family.  Then I realized why it’s done here the way it is: everyone watching was family.  The whole community is family.  As I looked around, tears were silently streaming down most people’s faces.  There was a glaring difference between the sympathetic reactions I’d expected to see on the girls’ faces (as classmates of the woman’s daughter) and the profoundly sad tears I saw.  It looked as though the woman had been a real part of all of their lives as well.  Never before have I seen as tight-knit a community as we have here in our little village in Africa.

Afterthought –

I am definitely an outsider:  My mind was teeming with questions about the way they were doing things.  There was a lot that I saw that I didn’t understand, and I’m sure there was much more going on that I didn’t even pick up on.  I had the sense to keep my mouth shut (no one but immediate family spoke), but I was very very aware of my ignorance and out-of-place-ness.  I nervously questioned if I should even be there.  It didn’t help that I wore a sports shirt that screamed my name and favorite number, which I felt made me stick out even more (as if my ghostly skin tone wasn’t enough).  “I am not one of these people,” I thought self-consciously, feeling extremely insecure.

…who belongs?: Though I was trying my absolute best to stay in the very back background, the villagers’ respect for me (which I flat-out don’t deserve in my own right) still showed through.  One old woman came to where the kids and I were huddled under a small tree for shade, and seriously scolded them because I wasn’t being sufficiently sheltered from the sun.  Family members who were shooing others away from the body motioned for me to stay and pray.  Very few people gave me a second glance, and no one looked at me with judgment or questioned my presence.  On the walk back to school, I led the girls in prayer.  All of these things were obviously blessings from God, sent to ease my fears of being an unwelcome intruder into the lives of these people.  “They are allowing me to become one of them,” I thought gratefully, feeling (despite my unworthiness of such an honor) extremely blessed.