Location: Magamba, Chunya District (1.5 hour drive from
Mshewe, my village home). Most people there speak the Nyiha language and some
speak the Safwa language or other languages such as Sukuma. Nearly everyone is also able to speak Swahili.
I picked up Amani (my Safwa colleague who lives in Mshewe)
at 8am, or at least, I arrived at his house at 8am and he wasn’t quite ready, and
our Nyiha colleague, who was supposed to be coming with us, hadn’t arrived
either and wasn’t responding to phonecalls or text messages. We decided to
leave without him. I played with Amani’s little girl while I waited for him to
get ready and we set off quarter of an hour later. The road is a graded dirt
road, and for the most part is rough but in reasonable condition, but some bits
were very bumpy and made worse by recent rain.
As we drove, Amani told me he’d had a phonecall from the
pastor who was arranging things for us in Magamba, to say that there was a
funeral. This may not sound so significant to you, but I know what that means.
It means that many people who I would have expected to see at the seminar will
instead be at the funeral, which typically lasts three days. At some point on
the journey we picked up three people to give them a lift to Magamba, as they
were going to attend the funeral. When we arrived, we found out the person who
died was a fairly close relative of the pastor who was hosting us, and so any hope
of starting the workshop that day was lost. No-one would have turned up anyhow.
Instead, we went to the funeral. There were crowds of people, women sitting in
one area and preparing food and men sitting in another area. It was very much
an open-air event, though thankfully we got ushered into a house away from the
loud speakers and out of the hot sun. You wouldn’t have known that it was a
funeral from the music being played, it just sounded like a typical gospel event.
We were joined by a group of pastors (as usual, though being
a lady I wasn’t expected to be with the ladies) for chai and mandazi. For us
the funeral involved a lot of sitting or standing around and waiting. I got a
chance to chat with some people and show them local language Scriptures and
later we got a chance to chat with the pastors who had come (it seems that
pastors from all the local churches will come to a funeral to pay their
respects and to preach) about our work. Can you imagine using a funeral in
England as a platform for advertising what you do?! But here it was fine, and
indeed a good opportunity, because at no expense to us, we were able to meet
with pastors from various places that we might otherwise never meet.
The funeral in general seemed to start with lots of church
choirs and music, followed by some preaching and then the burial, which took
place in the back yard of the person’s home. Before covering the body, people
were able to pass by and say their final goodbye. After covering, as we do in
England, people could throw dirt in the grave and finally place flowers etc on
it. I just observed all of this from a distance – I couldn’t really see
anything, but asked Amani for explanations. After the burial, people gave their
condolences in the form of money and they added it all up and announced the
total sum. This may seem very mercenary to us, but I think we have to remember
that a funeral is an expensive event – the family have to feed everyone that
comes, and that could literally be hundreds of people (I don’t know how many people
were at this one, but it looked like well over a hundred), so people’s
condolences help cover the costs. (We got fed there too, even though we didn’t
know the deceased. I got a plate of rice with a bit of cow that I tried not to
look at or smell but just eat, it was offal of some kind – it tasted okay but
the texture was far from pleasant).
We returned to the
pastor’s house after food and sat and chatted about the Bible with some people
that were visiting him, before returning to the funeral for a while to see the
pastor. Now they were preaching. And when we visited the funeral again the next
day, there was someone else preaching, so I get the impression that after the
main event, the rest of the three days is taken with preaching and music and
just being there with the bereaved people.
That night it poured with rain, a real thunderstorm.
Needless to say, I didn’t sleep particularly well! Despite the rain it was
still pretty hot, though by morning the rain had cooled things off. I was
worried it might affect the roads, but thankfully it didn’t. So on day two we
were able to hold the workshop, although the pastor was still at the funeral,
and I think a number of others must have been too. Instead of the twenty plus
participants we had at the first one, we had just six, and they were late. I
tried not to be discouraged, and actually taught the children for a bit while I
waited for the teachers to turn up – there were a lot more children there than
teachers! They came and sat through most of the workshop, just for something to
do. Sometimes I was able to involve them in games and songs, but mostly they
just sat and watched.
The workshop went okay, but I had to squeeze 1.5 days of
teaching into one day because of the funeral, so I had to do some rethinking!
It felt a bit like they hadn’t learned anything, as the way that they did the
exercises didn’t seem to show any improvement form the first workshop, and two
of the teachers hadn’t done any teaching since the first workshop. But I just
hope and pray that it has had some small impact. I was encouraged by one of the
pastors at the funeral who said that he had noticed a difference since their
Sunday school teacher had attended the first workshop. The six participants I
had were an enthusiastic bunch and we had some lively conversation over lunch,
so the day passed quickly and I enjoyed it despite having a headache and
despite the heat (it got pretty sticky in the afternoon). And we had two little
visitors – hedgehogs! First there was one, which I took outside, but it came
back. So I took it out again, further away, and it came back. In the end we
gave up, and it found a dark, dry corner of the church to hide in, behind the
electric guitars, and later it was joined by its friend.
Before leaving we called by the funeral again to say goodbye
to our host-pastor. The preaching was still going on. He took us to the market
as he wanted to buy as a gift of fish, which are plentiful there as it is about
an hour away from Lake Rukwa. I really enjoy the fish, despite the bones. They
fry them so that they will keep for a while, without refrigeration. We gave
three people a lift back to Mshewe, arriving back in the village around 7pm,
and the evening sky was just stunning. As I drove the last little bit back to
my house alone, I just stopped the car in the middle of the field I was driving
through (on a dirt track) and watched the glorious sky that no photo could do
justice to. Breathtaking.
