Disclaimer: The views represented in this blog are entirely my own and do not represent the views of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.
It is 6:50am. I tie my shoes and head out the door at the time I normally do. As soon as I step outside, I see the grey skies and realize I forgot my umbrella. It hasn’t stopped raining for 6 days. The rains are a much-needed relief after so many concerns about drought, but their noise upon a tin roof makes it difficult to sleep at night, and the mud they create makes it extremely difficult for students to get to school, and thus causes attendance to go down heavily. I go back in and grab my umbrella and set my large backpack by the door, so that I can easily get to it when I come back after school and prepare to board a minibus to spend the weekend in Lilongwe. Several friends will be there that I haven’t seen for a while.
I walk past my neighbor’s house, carefully trying to avoid heavily muddy spots, although it’s not much use. I begin the long trek across the football field, up the side of the mountain towards the school. “Madam!” I hear behind me. It’s my neighbor’s daughter, a Form 4 student (senior), who is power walking towards me. At first I think she wants to share my umbrella on her own walk to school, so I extend it out to her. “Madam,” she says again, “I don’t think we are going to have school today.”
“Why?” I ask.
“The bursar and the head teacher [principal] were in a car accident at Chinkhoma and the head teacher has passed away.”
“What?” I ask. She repeats the simple story, not realizing that I understood what she said verbally. As anyone does upon receiving news like this, my immediate reaction is to believe she must be mistaken. The head teacher is only 32 years old and this is his first post as a head teacher. In America, I would try and put this conception that this is false information out of my mind quickly, but here in Malawi it is common for false news of deaths of celebrities to spread quickly, so I entertain the idea for longer than normal that she is somehow misinformed. I follow her back to her house and her mother offers me a chair, which I don’t really decline but also don’t accept, instead staring into the distance in shock. Her father has apparently gone to the hospital and they tell me he will be back soon at which point they will find me and tell me what to do. I go back to my house and sit on my bed. My phone battery is nearly dead, for the first time ever at my site. Despite the fact that I have no electricity, my solar setup is fairly effective, but with the week of clouds and rains, I haven’t been able to charge. Just before my phone dies, my neighbor calls me and tells me to come to his house. I come and he explains to me what has happened.
The bursar and the head were driving home from a meeting at a distant school and had stopped in Chinkhoma, a nearby trading center, before their car was hit head-on by a semi. The bursar was now in the hospital, where my neighbor had just come from, and the head teacher was killed instantly, the impact from the semi, breaking his neck. Although I am still in shock, I no longer entertain the possibility that the people telling this story are mistaken. My neighbor tells me that he and the deputy head (vice principal) identified the body at the mortuary.
We make the slow trek up to the school. We meet other teachers along the way. The man who owns the estate next door comes out to greet us and shakes our hands, saying, “Pepani, Pepani, Pepani kwambiri.” Sorry, sorry, very sorry.” I’ve never met this man, although I’ve heard about him. As we approach the school, the students can tell that something is up. We meet in the staff room to discuss what to do. My neighbor launches into a vivid and graphic description of the injuries sustained by the bursar and the biological causes of the head teacher’s death. I am slightly perturbed, but I recognize from the faces on the other teachers that this is normal. We are divided in half as a staff. Some will stay here to inform the students about what has happened and some will go to the mortuary to be with the family. I am chosen to go to the mortuary, along with one male teacher and the two female teachers. The female teachers are chosen to go to the mortuary, the others say, to comfort the widow and the mother of the deceased.
We walk next door to the estate of the neighbor we had just met on the path. I learn that his name is Jack. We are relying on him to drive us to town. The only person who owns a car among us is the bursar, whose car is now totaled. As we wait, one teacher receives graphic photos of the accident. He shows them to me and I am again perturbed, but remind myself that this is normal. He passes his phone around to the other teachers as well as Jack’s relatives and they all look with interest. I quietly wonder if the reason this is done is to give a greater sense of closure. It’s really not that different from the body viewing at a visitation. Then I remember that generally, when bodies have been visibly damaged, we generally try to hide them or make them up to look nice at funerals. Still, I remember this being common in Mexico as well. I wonder if perhaps the United States is the one that is odd here, not the rest of the world, with our efforts to hide death as much as possible, and place it outside the house. In Malawi, funerals are usually held in the household of the deceased or in the deceased’s yard. But in America we make sure that nursing homes, hospitals, and funeral homes are in abundance.
Once Jack is ready we pile into the car. Along the way, Jack picks up a hitchhiker and I am crammed against the window. We have to travel through Chinkhoma to get to the mortuary in town and the accident has not yet been cleaned up. We can see the smashed front of the bursar’s car and the semi still sitting. They both look suspended in time, as if someone took a photograph of the accident the moment it happened. The teacher who showed me the photo is looking and saying, “He could not survive that. No, he could not survive that.” “Mayo ine,” one of the female teachers says. Roughly, “oh my God.”
We drop the hitchhiker off just before town and arrive at the hospital. I think we’re going to go inside and see the bursar, but we immediately go to the mortuary where a few women are gathered mourning. There is a sort of shelter attached to the mortuary, kind of like a large concrete carport, with benches around it. In the middle is a large block in the shape of a coffin. We haven’t been sitting down for long when a car pulls up and an older woman comes out wailing, “Mwana wane waliko? Mwana wane waliko?!”—Where has my child gone? It is the Head’s mother. She has a large photo of him in his graduation outfit in a clear folder and is going around asking everyone this question with wide eyes and a battered tone of voice. She sits down and begins wailing more words that I can’t understand and I suddenly recall that the Head Teacher was Tumbuka, not Chichewa. I doubt that I will understand many of the words said throughout this event.
My phone dies not long after we arrive and I simply sit as more people arrive. As women arrive they sit inside the shelter while the men stand in the grassy knoll outside. The men are all making phone calls, especially the deputy head, making arrangements for the funeral. I remember that this is how things are here. The men arrange so that the women can grieve. The men and women do not sit together or chat in this moment, aside from the head teacher’s brother, who throws himself into this mother’s arms upon arriving.
When he arrives, he arrives with his sister-in-law, the head’s wife and she and his mother begin wailing together. I see that the two female teachers who have come with us are struggling to hold back tears. Generally, the only people who cry at a funeral are close relatives, and even then it’s usually only women. Throughout the entire event, I only see one man cry, the head teacher’s brother, and he only allows himself to do so once. I struggle to hold back my own tears. I wonder what my purpose is in being here, as I don’t feel that I am much of a comfort by simply being here. I try to put these thoughts out of my mind. It is culturally appropriate for everyone in a community to be involved in the grieving process and burial of a person. When a funeral happens, it is expected that you come even if you didn’t know the person well. Still, it’s hard not to feel pointless sitting here, holding back tears and saying nothing.
Jack strikes up a conversation with me and as the other men go to buy a coffin, he takes me to a service station and buys me a snack. We sit in his car and eat it and he gives me more money and tells me to buy more. I ask him if he’s sure and he says, “I don’t know how long we are going to be here.” I knew this was true. I go inside and get more food. We head back to the mortuary. I simply stand around and wait. I chat with some teachers who used to teach at my school that I haven’t seen since they moved, including a few that I met during training. The rain had let up just long enough for us to go to the service station, but it now starts up again, slowly. More people have arrived than I’ve ever seen at an American visitation, and this is just the morgue. After a longer time of waiting, the casket is brought out and we pile again into Jack’s car in order to head back to our village. The family rides in the back of the pick-up truck along with the casket. They are using makeshift plastic bags as ponchos. There are a good amount of us now and since Jack’s car is a hatchback, 2 people ride in the trunk while 4 of us squeeze in the backseat.
The rain picks up on the road and there’s not much talking. I’m wondering how heavily it’s hitting the people who are riding in the back of the pick-up. By the time we get back to the village, it’s coming down heavily and we have to drive on the dirt road which has now become entirely mud. Jack isn’t entirely sure where the HT’s house is and has to ask for directions from some boys selling chips. “Did our friends go this way?” he asks one of them. They tell us yes. We arrive in a narrow alley between two grass fences and I’m surprised that the car fit inside it. I’m even more surprised to see several other cars. All of us exit the car except Jack who looks for a place he can park, which seems to be impossible. There is a large sea of faces gathered and I realize we are outside the HT’s house. They are crowded into the entrance of the grass fence surrounding the house and attempting to listen to someone speaking, which is difficult in the rain. I’m not entirely sure what’s happening. Someone offers to lock my backpack in the pick-up so I let them. I hear wailing from within the fence. After some more talking (we had apparently arrived towards the end of this ceremony), people begin to shuffle around. The teacher next to me says, “it is time for body viewing.” I am caught between surprise and total lack of surprise at this. After the description and the photos, I wasn’t sure that we would have a body viewing. But the fact that the photos and the description were so graphic and that this was acceptable should have clued me in on the fact that there would be a body viewing.
The family is made to go first and then the teachers. As I approach the fence and prepare to enter the house, the Deputy stops me and says, “he needs someone to escort him when he goes through,” so he grabs another teacher who holds my hand and guides me through to the house as people struggle to squeeze out of our way. The wails are in unison now, so much so that they almost sound like a howling wind or mild scream. Everything is happening so quickly that I’m not sure of my emotions. I am sad and want to cry, but I am simultaneously assaulted with so many cultural differences that I can’t help but pay attention to them and feel disoriented. We walk through the house. The HT’s body is in the casket below a slate of glass. I can see that his face is smashed, although it doesn’t look as graphic as it had in the photos or in my imagination. I’m not given much time to evaluate this, which I am thankful for, as the line moves quickly and we exit the house through the back door and return to the yard. The students now go in to view the body and the wailing increases yet again.
In the yard I stand with the other teachers as they discuss things rapidly in Chichewa. The rain is pouring at this point and I am one of three of the 12 teachers who has an umbrella so multiple people crowd under it. The Head Teacher has been dead less than 10 hours. We have already had the visitation.
What I gather from the conversation is the debate about who needs to travel with the body to the HT’s home village, which is over 2 hours away. I quickly remind people that I cannot travel at night so I cannot go on that day. I am told that the burial will be the following day and it’s okay. I can just go then. The Deputy is chatting with someone who I think is orchestrating transport for the next day who wrongly believes that he is the Head Teacher. The Deputy switches to English and says, “The Head Teacher is dead.” He says it without much emotion; if anything, there is a bit of annoyance in his tone of voice rather than grief and I am again reminded that although people do acknowledge sadness, the men are supposed to be the ones planning and orchestrating, not grieving in public.
I look around and see many people that I have met from outside the school in the community. I had been concerned that compared with my community in the Southern Region, I wasn’t getting to know people as well. I worried that I wasn’t integrating. Here, I see just how many people I do know.
After the large crowd gets through the house, we wait by the fence entrance for the casket to be brought out and placed back in the pick-up. For a brief moment, I am expected to help lift the casket into the truck, but I achieve not much more than being in the way. I am trying to hold my umbrella as well and the backpack which has been taken out of the truck and is now on my back is continuously hitting the people around me. Someone takes part of the casket from me and lifts it around me. The women of the family climb back into the truck to travel with the body. I think of how this would go in America, how they would be traveling behind the body, not with it. And I wonder if this or that makes more sense. The teachers who were assigned to travel with the body to his village also climb into the back of the truck. Everyone is drenched. A debate breaks out in Chichewa that I can’t entirely understand, but I understand enough to know that some people don’t think everyone who is on the back of the truck should be on the back of the truck due to space and transportation costs. They should go tomorrow. After a protracted argument between the men, two of the women on the truck step off. They don’t seem annoyed. They seem almost like they expected this to happen.
The procession begins with the church leading the truck out from the house towards the road. They are singing a song but I can’t hear it very well over the truck, which sounds as if it needs a new muffler. As we walk, the rain stops and the sun comes out. The sun’s entrance is very sudden. It is as if it had never rained at all. I fall behind and eventually a car picks me up. It’s Jack. He has two Group Village Headmen with him, whom he drops off at their various places before driving us to the village police station. I’m not 100% sure why we’re there until we get out and walk around the back. The totaled car is there. We walk up and look at the damage close-up. As we look, most of the students who have come from the procession walk up and look at it for themselves. We go back to Jack’s car and drive off. He takes me back to my house and tells me that death is a blinder, because we can’t see what the HT is experiencing on the other side and that perhaps it is relief.
Upon entering my house, I charge my phone via the solar and call my boss from Peace Corps. “I’m sorry to call you on a weekend,” I say, and proceed to tell him what happened.
“What?” he says.
“I was shocked too,” I say. “We’ve already had the funeral, but the burial is tomorrow in his home village.” I ask him about logistics and what to do, but he is still in disbelief and says “pepani, pepani,” the same way everyone else has too. Obviously I wasn’t going to Lilongwe this weekend. He tells me to go to the burial and thereafter to follow the lead of the Deputy and the other teachers.
I go back up to the school to grab some things and find all of the teachers gathered there discussing logistics for the following day. They have rented a large bus to take all of us, some family members, chiefs, and some select students up to the HT’s village, but the proportion of each group to ride on this particular bus keeps changing back and forth over continuous debate.
I go back to my house and sit on my bed wondering what has just happened. Everything has happened so quickly that I haven’t had any time to process it and still feel a bit of shock about it all. Here, as a visiting teacher, the Head Teacher is the one who welcomes you and receives you. I really liked my Head Teacher. I also wasn’t sure how to receive the news because I hadn’t known him that long, although in that timeframe I was working with him quite a bit. Then I think about Malawi and how much it impacts the entire community when a single person dies, but particularly someone of that stature. Teachers are fairly respected here, and so the fact that it was the Head Teacher was a particularly painful blow. The following day, my neighbor’s daughter will tell me “To lose someone like that…a graduate…” before trailing off. I knew what she was thinking without her having to finish. There are not many graduates here, although this is changing as more and more teachers seek to better themselves against all odds. The Head Teacher also taught several classes and I realize that he and the bursar were the only ones we had in the math and sciences departments. I wonder how the students will learn without a teacher for a time. I wonder how quickly the Ministry of Education will send a replacement.
Replacement. It feels like a dirty word at this time, less than 24 hours after his death, and yet I can’t help but think about it, because it’s one of the many ways his death will affect the community. I wonder how his widow and how his children are doing. In Malawi, children are generally considered orphans if they lack one parent, not necessarily both. I wonder if his children will be called orphans.
The following day, I head to the school and wait to depart. I have been told that we will leave at 7am sharp. Do not be late. We leave at 9am. I sit in the back with the students, while the rest of the teachers sit in the front. I do not do this on purpose, but I am the first one on the bus and choose a seat where the students happen to sit. I realize that due to cultural power distance, the students have given the front seats to the teachers and elders out of respect. The head of our division of the Ministry of Education is also on the bus. I do not see any chiefs. When the female students enter the bus they have several large pots and spoons. The dishes take up almost half of the back seat, but the students squeeze, sitting on top of them if they need to. They’re going to cook nsima for themselves and for the family as well as the rest of the school once the funeral ends.
I have brought a Hemingway book to read on the bus; it seems a good choice given the dreariness of the day. Some students see me reading and are curious, so I let them have the book. They pass it around and read to each other. We stop in town to purchase some meat for the food at the funeral. We wait before driving another hour north. When we arrive, we are significantly late and most of the speeches given just outside the family’s house are finished. The amount of people surrounding the house is very large and most of them are sitting on the muddy ground or standing. The chiefs are sitting in chairs under a thatch roof shelter. Someone spots me and brings me to sit down on a chair under the roof with the chiefs. Another person has to get up to free up a seat for me, which makes me extremely uncomfortable. In my mind, I am a foreigner and I did not know this person as well as the others here. They should get the chair. But In Malawian culture, I am a visitor/guest, so I should be given a chair before anyone else. It would be rude to refuse the chair so I accept and realize Jack is sitting on the other side of me. We don’t sit for very long before this section of the ceremony is over. For a brief moment I wonder if that was the end of the day’s activities, but I very quickly put this thought out of my head. No event ever lasts for only an hour or two here.
Everyone else stands up and starts walking, so follow them, trying my best not to slip and fall in the mud. As we walk, I see the HT’s brother come beside us, being held by another man I don’t know. The brother is crying loudly. It is the only time I see a man cry the whole weekend. Later, when I see him again, he seems extremely composed.
We walk across the tarmac road to a very large Catholic Church. Someone tells me that the teachers should wait outside so that they can sit together, but someone else tells me that I should enter the church without them. Again people are not really sure which group I should be included in: visitor/foreigner or teacher who lives here. The person wanting me to come inside is slightly more adamant, so I obey him and go into the church. It’s packed full and extremely hot despite the rain outside and all the windows and doors being open. I squeeze between two people and listen to the melancholy murmuring. The HT’s mother enters not long after, again showing everyone she passes a picture of her son, saying, “mwana wane,” repeatedly. When the wailing ends and the ceremony starts, I again remember that I am not going to understand anything today. Where I live in Kasungu is just before the language border between Chichewa and Chitumbuka. The HT’s home village which we are in, is Tumbuka. I don’t speak Chitumbuka. Apparently someone has seen me and the priest occasionally throws in English, entirely for my singular benefit and not any of the other (well over 1,000) people present.
The ceremony goes on for a long time and many of the people around me fall asleep. After a while, I cannot hold my bladder any longer and I go out to ask someone where the chim (latrine) is. Apparently a lot of other people have had this same thought and when I exit the church, I see an even larger crowd than was inside, which I didn’t think was possible. After coming back, I sit on the porch of a nearby building with some other women. People still do not mix by gender so I try to follow suit. I meet a teacher from a nearby school who has requested a Peace Corps Volunteer for next year and I chat with him about that. Before long, we see people exiting the church and climbing into the few vehicles that are around. The casket is brought out and placed in the back of the pickup truck. We begin following it; I am behind the chiefs again. In general, in villages, Malawians walk slowly, but a funeral procession adds to this. I continually walk in front of the T/A and wonder if there is some sort of cultural injunction against me walking in front of the T/A and put myself behind him. We walk along the highway for what seems like an hour, just to travel the distance of a few hundred yards. This is the main road of the whole country, but we take up the entire road and no one seems to care. At one point a car honks its horn at the crowd, trying to get through, and several people make the particular Chichewa noise of “ah-ah,” meant to show extreme disapproval, because this is obviously a funeral.
We arrive at the graveyard and I’m so far in the back I can’t really see what’s going on. Most graveyards in Malawi are in the middle of the forest and this one is no exception. In many places, particularly in the Central Region, a person can’t enter the graveyard unless there is a funeral. If you do so, people may suspect you of being a witch. We all sit down. The ground wasn’t yet dry from the rain, so I worry about the mud, but everyone else does it so I feel I should and try to find a collection of leaves to sit on, which isn’t much use. We sit in the graveyard for over an hour. Almost all of this time is taken up by two different choirs singing, sometimes singing different songs at the same time, which was confusing. At the end I hear words being said, but I can’t make them out, and think they are probably in Chitumbuka anyway. We are so far away and there are so many trees in the way that I couldn’t even see the casket. I hear a noise that sounds like hammering. I ask Jack what it is and he shakes his head before responding in Chichewa, “The hole they dug is too small for the casket so they are beating it into the hole to try to force it in.” I respondm “that doesn’t seem respectful,” without thinking and he then reports my words to the T/A, which concerns me because I don’t want to seem offensive or disrespectful myself. But the T/A doesn’t seem to have a negative reaction. He acknowledges Jack’s words and just keeps staring forward.
We are dismissed and exit the forest. My pants are extremely wet, as I’m sure, are everyone else’s. We walk across the road and everyone goes to their various places to eat. I am told that I will eat with the chiefs, I assume because I am technically a visitor and that had to be honored. So I go to the house where the chiefs’ food has been prepared and sit down to eat with them. I am told to sit in a very particular seat, so I obey. Power distance can also influence where people sit in a meal. All the discussion while eating seems normal. It is as if we were having a meal at home rather than right after a funeral. However, at some point someone discusses how the HT had two young children and remark on how sad that is. After we had finished eating, a man who I assume is the chief of the village we are in (all the chiefs I have been eating with are from my area, where the HT had lived before his death). They exchange a multitude of “pepanis” with other, prior to consolations I don’t quite understand. Every time they say “pepani,” everyone in the room rubs their hands together and then turns both hands over onto the other side. I’m not entirely sure if I should join in this action or if this is something only chiefs do. Later someone will tell me that it’s likely the latter, as they have never seen it themselves. We exit the house and I thank the person who cooked our food.
Because I cannot travel at night, I again ride with Jack back to my village, this time along with the three chiefs and their two secretaries. People are concerned that the bus which took the teachers and students may return after dark. It still feels odd that we are leaving a funeral. No one’s attitude reflects what I would assume is the typical attitude after a funeral. It is not that people are not sad, nor is it even that they are hiding or bottling up their emotions. It is simply that they are responding to it differently than any of the ways I see people like this responding to grief in the US. Although the chiefs’ presence is consoling, it also serves a political and traditional purpose and in the car, it feels as if I’m traveling with a group of politicians who has just come to visit a community after a tragedy. Yet it still feels like a sincere consolation, and not one borne of a desire for power or exploitation, which also feels different from what I’m used to.
We arrive at the village in the late afternoon and I am dropped off at my house. I go inside and try to process the events of the weekend. I don’t process them. Rather, I hold them suspended in my head, staring at them over and over again. The dissonance between what should be reality and what is reality is something that I have been unable to reconcile yet. I have some of the same thoughts I had the day before, about what will happen now. But mostly I think about how I feel about this and about how people I have told have responded.
In America, most people’s image of Africa (and consequently, Malawi) is essentially one of poverty, hunger, violence, and AIDS. In fact, I’m not sure of anything any of us hear about Africa in America that is not related to one of those four things. The only way you hear about other things is by seeking them out for yourself. People often assume that Africans die as a result of one of these four things. Yet the most common cause of death in Malawi is actually the same as in America—car accidents. Of course, hunger and poverty both exist here. AIDS also exists, but its prevalence is steadily declining each year due to the massive efforts of local and international organizations (often you only hear about the negatives and not the positives though, which gives a distorted view of how the issue of AIDS is currently being handled). Violence in Malawi is actually at a lower rate than in the US—the reason that Malawi is sometimes assumed to be violent is because of people conflating all of Africa into one mental image. But fighting death here also involves confronting motor vehicles. We are often more similar than we realize.
There aren’t really more words. I’m sad. I think any elaboration on that is redundant at this point. All of this happened over a month ago now, but someone told me that they thought me writing this might be cathartic. Of course it has been, although nothing can reverse death. When we were taught how to act at a funeral in PST, a Malawian staff member asked us, rhetorically, “Do people also die in America?” Yes. Death happens everywhere, to everyone, throughout all time. That weekend, I kept thinking of one thing, something I dwelt on a lot when I first entered this country. This old poem by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop:
Those who are dead are never gone:
They are there in the thickening shadow.
The dead are not under the earth:
They are in the tree that rustles,
They are in the wood that groans,
They are in the water that sleeps,
They are in the hut,
They are in the crowd,
The dead are not dead.
Those who are dead are never gone,
They are in the breast of the woman,
They are in the child who is wailing
And in the firebrand that flames.
The dead are not under the earth:
They are in the fire that is dying,
They are in the grasses that weep,
They are in the whimpering rocks,
They are in the forest,
They are in the house,
The dead are not dead.