By the end of the dry season the dust is so deep you’d think you could plow it and pack it into strange dark snowmen. You drive through it and erase the road behind you as it envelops in a dirt curtain. You trudge through it and it gently yields, cushioning each step like a walk on a thin layer of clouds. By the end of the day your feet are stained, your tissues covered in dark snots, and your hair lets dust like a carpet being beat in the sun.
It’s the season of struggle. The water tap runs dry for days. Women and children are sent down to the river to carry buckets of water back on their heads, their necks thicker than a football player. Deep hacking echoes across the fire-blackened farms as women tear at the parched earth—the hacking coming from their chests, the widespread warm-season cold.
Death, ever the opportunist, hovers nearby. In the past two weeks she’s visited four of our neighbors. Early Tuesday morning she knocked on another door. We all heard it—a visit from Death is always announced with the beating of the drums. The music is bittersweet; as clearly as it’s a sad song that signals the mourning which the entire village will partake in, it is also a song of relief that someone’s suffering is finally over. Death here is undignified and as painfully slow as the drip from the dry tap. Life here is as delicate as the dust and as easily displaced.
The funeral started first thing in the morning. While the uniformed school children marched one by one up to the school, small groups of women and men started to shuffle down the long path to Fuka, the farthest and smallest of our sub-villages.
I stayed in bed, not out of disrespect, rather out of exhaustion. I’d heard the drums in the pre-dawn hours but was half awake and concentrating on the last chills of a fever. I wasn’t so much concerned with the infection, more annoyed; when you live and work with people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) and see the disease claim every aspect of their life you develop a new perspective on what it means to be sick, REALLY sick. Everything else you treat, continue with life, and know how lucky you are that it’s defeat-able.
It was mid-day by the time I heard that the drums were Rehema’s. She was a member of Tupambane, a group of PLWHA whom I work with on a daily basis, mostly in the community garden. The name ‘Tupambane’ literally means ‘we are fighting’. Rehema was a fighter. Looking through the mid-day sun I could see the smoke from the cooking fires trickling up from her home on the second far hill. It was just under an hour’s walk, a walk she made to my house several times a week.
I made it there as the last of the hundred or so family and friends received their plate of ugali and greens. Everyone sat scattered in the smallest slivers of shade on the hillside. They sat in silence, exhausted by the hike to the family burial ground, the piercing sun, and the weight of their mourning. The silence was pregnant with solidarity, not solitude, the mourning was collective, never a weight for an individual. The closest relatives were collected together in a small room surrounded on the outside by other close relatives. Had I arrived in the morning with everyone else I would have been escorted into the room to sit or lay with the body. Since I was late I was instead given a spot to kneel with Rehema’s sisters and daughters who cried in unison as Rehema’s mother prayed.
When I got up from the circle and left the room the sun blinded me a moment. As I refocused I met eyes with Rehema’s youngest daughter. I remembered her shyness when my own mother tried to greet her last summer, she covered her mouth and ducked behind Rehema. Though I know the Tanzanian concept of family means that Rehema’s two daughters will automatically be absorbed into an aunt’s family, or given to the charge of their grandmother, this is always the hardest part of Death for me here, she erases the path for the young living, their options in life are undeniably fewer as they join an ever-growing group of orphans and vulnerable children in the far reaches of the village. I smiled at Rehema’s daughter and her friend (both about five years old) and they fell over each other giggling—small gestures receive BIG reactions from kids here, it was generous of her.
One does not know the depths of generosity until they’re a guest in a Tanzanian’s home. Even at this funeral where I tried to blend into the back round I found myself given the best stool in the best shade next to my closest female friends. Rehema’s daughter showered me with shy smiles. When I gave a 1,000 shillingi contribution (which is standard) I was thanked by every single member of Rehema’s family, which shocked me by the great number of individuals in the small sub-village where I’d spent little time. When my close friend Christian, her cousin and the village chairman, thanked me I felt embarrassed. “It’s only a little” I said to him. He replied “even a little comes from a big heart”, one of the most gracious men I know.
The funeral continued all day until the evening prayer service at the Lutheran church. As the drums opened the day, the gong of the church bell closed it. The setting sun cast a deep rust color against the low clouds of dust which trailed the church goers.
At this time of day you can always find me sitting parallel to the mountain where the sun sets, alone with my thoughts. On days like that, the hard ones where you experience something that changes you and your course, like the dust closing the path behind you, it’s the lessons you learn from your friends and neighbors, like the one I learned about generosity, that shows you the path to take in the future.
Coffee coffee coffee buzz buzz buzz, mmm!
9 months ago
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