Death is different in Tanzania. There's more of it.
I've been wanting to write a blog entry to try to sort out my thoughts on this, but it's never the thing I want to do when I get on the Internet. However, today I got terrible news from home about the death of a family friend just done with his freshman year of high school, and these thoughts are suddenly more pressing.
In America, including this latest tragedy, I can count on two hands the number of people I know who have passed away, and that's with several fingers to spare. I think I've been to 2 funerals in America. On the other hand, I've been in Tanzania for about 9 months, and I've been to 2 funerals here.
Part of the difference is the way communities deal with death. In America bereavement is mostly an affair for family and close friends, and often a church community. Here, it is a community-wide event. As soon as the news comes, an msiba is held, which is like an all-night vigil with the bereaved. Everyone from the community comes to spend time with the family. At the last msiba I went to at school there were probably over 300 people in and around the family's house, with bonfires in front and in back. The girl students were mostly packed inside the house singing hymns, while the boys were gathered around the fire in front occasionally joining in the singing. The faculty and other community members were in the backyard. The deceased was the sister of a teacher who had lived at the school for a few months. She died in Dodoma (far far away), but I guess our teacher was the closest family member, because the body was sent directly to our school, arriving a little after midnight. (Bear in mind that the only electricity in the area is at our school, so staying up past 10:00 when the power is turned off is extremely rare.) I left shortly thereafter as I was getting company the next day and needed to sleep, but I think most people stayed several more hours and even the whole night. I think that most of the people there had never met the deceased and many of them barely new her sister, our teacher. Even the next day the house probably never had fewer than 50 people there. I had to do some shopping and my mzee thankfully told me to walk the long way home because walking by the house with my tomatoes and cooking oil, everyone would assume I had brought them to help the family out.
One of the last books I read before coming here was The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, which is a nonfiction work about an author whose husband unexpectedly died while their only daughter is dangerously ill. The book is about dealing with the grief, and while I can't understand what it's like to lose someone that close to me and I don't think I'd find the Tanzanian style of grieving comforting, the book has me convinced that there can be American cultural deficiencies in dealing with grief. Or maybe there's just no good way to do something so difficult.
The biggest difference about death I notice about death in America and death in Tanzania is in its conspicuousness. Here, where the whole community comes out, deaths are hard to miss. But with poor nutrition, limited access to healthcare, and AIDS, deaths seem more frequent here, especially of younger people. One of my teacherfriends is a bit of an amateur photographer. When I looked through some of his photo albums there was hardly a single picture of more than a handful of people for which he didn't tell me that one or two of them had passed away. Mostly these were pictures from his college and early teaching days, at most 10 years ago.
One volunteer told me an anecdote about a village meeting she attended where the villagers started complaining to each other "Don't you hate msibas?" "Oh yeah, such a pain, somebody you don't know dies and you have to drop everything to spend all night at the msiba," and so forth. Finally they concluded "Well, it's our culture, can't do anything about it."
On a completely unrelated topic, this past week has been my In-Service Training, so I've been reunited with all the remaining people from my training class. It's been great seeing everybody, but I've come to realize how big of a shock I'll be in for when I go back to America. Having people talking to me all the time (especially about real things that often require thought to reply) is kind of stressful. It's going to be a big change to go home.
As a celebration of IST, some of us had an informal crazy-hair contest. I've got a mohawk,(I'll try to get some pictures to you guys sometime soonish), and some other notables were the checkerboard, bullseye, Tanzanian shilling sign ( /= ), braids, and triple mohawk. Although most of the cuts were truly hideous, mine didn't turn out to bad in the end and a lot of people are urging me to keep it. The jury is still out on that one.
Here in Iringa there is an NGO that produces lots of really neat crafts and also sells fresh ice cream and chocolate cake--all the labor being done by handicapped Tanzanians. One of the deaf people there was fascinated by my hair, and I explained to a couple of the non-deaf people that it was a tribal haircut in America, worn both by Wamohawk and Wapunk. They translated that into sign language for the deaf people, and while they still wanted to touch it, that was a perfectly acceptable explanation to them. Mostly, wandering around town with our crazy hair, we've been struck by the lack of reaction. As Dr. Josh with his horrible tri-hawk said, I'd be getting a much bigger reaction even in a trendy hip area of Tampa.
