Culture: Confusing Conclusions

Vague bits of this blog have been floating around my mind for months now.  I don’t know why I’m surprised when I find out something totally new about this culture—I am really only ten years old here—but I remain shocked to find out things that I have never heard of, and they catch me off guard. 

Quite a while back, a local friend told a missionary that she had seen another missionary “eating at the place where you buy the food, right on the street.”   This is not the mecca of street food, but we do have a donut of sorts and cooked corn over the coals and the occasional sweet potato.  This man had bought his donut and eaten it right there, and the local was shocked at the uncouthness of the whole thing.  “Well,” said the other missionary, “what should he have done instead?”  Taken it home, of course!  No one eats right there where you buy it.  What about ice cream, she persisted?  Thankfully enough, ice cream is an exception.  And we wonder why people think we are strange?  If I missed this one small cultural reality, imagine how many others I am missing!

Or the African who saw a white woman out running for exercise and concluded, “That person is very lazy.”  Lazy???  “No one who actually goes out to run has enough work to do!”  

And with each new revelation, our cultural glasses get bent again, refashioned, turned upside-down sometimes.  Sometimes with laughter, sometimes not quite as much laughter.

Several months back I went to the funeral of a little boy who was related to my friend Esther.  Her little nephew, Isaac, had died two days earlier in the hospital.  He had had pneumonia for about a month.  After three courses of antibiotics and his lungs still not clearing, his tiny body, two weeks from one year old, gave up the fight.  Telling people what is actually wrong with them in the hospital is not a cultural value, and I might be able to count on one hand the number of people who have told me what their child, or spouse, or parent actually died of.  No one asks and they are not usually told.  But this time the doctor did tell Isaac’s family, “maybe he was poisoned.” Even though there was no evidence for poisoning.    

The web of superstition, witchcraft, ignorance, poverty, lack of education and blame-shifting is interwoven and intricate.  It makes me so angry some days that I just want to scream.  In addition to grieving the loss of their baby, now the family wonders who poisoned him, and for what reason.  

Isaac’s funeral was the first time I felt so comfortable being out of place.  Funerals have to be some of the most awkward occasions.  I always feel self-conscious just attending most of them, as attendance is expected if you live near the person who died, whether you actually ever even said ‘hi’ to them or not.  The men and women sit in different places and children don’t attend.  Funerals are long, three days if you are really committed, and neighbors will usually spend one night at least sleeping on the ground outside the home.  I am not so committed, but still they can take the better part of a day.   In addition to all this, everyone is expected to pass by the body to verify that the person is actually dead, and that it is the person that they said is dead.  Then when you sit around outside with other members of your gender, talk quickly turns to the weather, the latest gossip, politics, babies, really anything that comes to mind.  There is laughter and chatting and texting on phones, and it doesn’t feel very funeral-like.  But I do know it is important to attend.  And it is a great opportunity to get to know people, even if it doesn’t come at a time that is convenient for me, and there isn't a time that it is convenient to be interrupted for the better part of a day.  Since when was it important for people to die on my timetable?  

During Isaac’s funeral, there were loudspeakers literally BLARING music.  They were about four feet from the front door, and it would have been distorted and brash with heavy-duty earplugs in.  When I was escorted indoor to say “sorry” to the women of the family, whom I had never met, they moved people around so that I could sit next to the grieving mother, who didn’t know me anymore than I knew her.  “Please let me sit down at the end by her feet (she was lying down).”  No, no, sit right next to her head.  They kept shoving people over so that I could have this seat.  So I settled in and just sat quietly along with the other women in this special room for the particularly-grieving ones.  Mama Isaac started really weeping, just shaking as she lay next to me.  Other women reached over me, telling her to be quiet, it was okay, Isaac was in heaven.  I just put my hand on her, at a loss.  I prayed. 

When the body arrived from the morgue, the men at the funeral run to the van to get it and run with it inside to the wailing women.  Then it is brought out and the official funeral begins.  The pastor, in this case, got up and preached and told the plan of salvation to all of those who were there.  He reminded the Christian family that they would see Isaac again, that we do not grieve “as those without hope.”  Then Baba Isaac began to wail and called out for Grandpa, and an old man came to him and comforted him.  

There was much more to the funeral, more wailing and Isaac’s aunty just passing out completely, the burial where half of the people there were listening to political speeches on someone’s phone right next to the open grave, so much so that others asked them to move farther away.  Every funeral leaves me baffled in new ways.

About two months before Isaac’s funeral, a little baby down our road had died of sickness.  Don’t think this is an uncommon occurrence.  In fact, it might be one of the greatest griefs of living here, and it wears me down at times.  At this funeral for little Junior, who was just a little over a year, his mama cried out to Grandpa as well, and an older man came and comforted her.  So when I saw Esther next, I asked her about it.  Are the men who came to comfort them really their Grandpas, or is it a superstition or custom, or what?  She said that if the baby is a boy, they call for Grandpa and if it’s a girl, for Grandma.  And both of the grandpas that I heard called for have already died.  I tried to get deeper behind the meaning—usually there is a lot more to it than meets the eye—but that seemed to be it.  “But you know, right, that for every tribe there is an opposing tribe, their “joking/teasing tribe.”  

Nope.  Never heard of it.

They tease each other. 

But only at funerals.

And if you don’t want them to do that at a funeral, you tie a piece of grass on your door and they will know it’s not a time for a joke.  

“What kind of jokes do they play?” I asked hesitatingly.

“Well, sometimes they even just run off with the body.”

By this time I was more than wide-eyed.  “How do they get the body back?”

“The family collects as much money as they can, and they pay the other tribe’s people to bring the body back.”  

Ok.  Still processing.

“And then the tribe that took the body will take the money that the family gave them, add their own money, lots of it, and then they will go to the market and buy more food than anyone for the funeral.

Hmmm.  Not really getting it.  So they give to the funeral?
“Yes, more than anyone else.  So at first it is joking and doesn’t seem very nice, but then in the end it’s nicer than anyone else!”  Esther finishes her explanation confidently, happily, a little amused at my confusion. 

I asked the Swahili teacher who was here that day teaching the boys.

“Oh yes,” he says, “my tribe will have a huge party on the grave all night long after the person is buried.”

Then Esther adds, “At the last funeral, a man from the opposing tribe jumped down in the hole with the coffin and just told them to bury him there with the person, until they raised enough money to make him get out.

Wow.  I am in WAY over my head.  And all of it serves as a glaring reminder of how little I really understand!  Come to find out later, these tribes do use other occasions to tease one another.  Things like, “You are going to have lots of children….and they are all going to be dwarves!”  And everyone finds it very funny.  ☺

God, help me be a learner. Thank you that in seeing other cultures, my eyes are opened to my own culture and its own set of crazy ideas and pursuits.  

May my eyes be open to see what You are doing in this place.  May my mouth be open to speak what is true of You.  May my ears be listening for your voice.  May my feet be fitted with the Gospel of peace.

 You never change, and You came for all peoples, and all times, in all places.  Nothing escapes your great power and love.  This whole diverse, shockingly beautiful world is orchestrated with care and precision so that men may know that there is a God who loves them desperately.  Thank you for the dependence that you call me to, that you push me into, especially when I don’t have the first clue.  Thank you that when I do depend on you instead of having to have everything under my own pathetic control, that you teach me and grow me in faith.  I want to say, with Hudson Taylor:

"I am no longer anxious about anything, as I realize the Lord is able to carry out His will, and His will is mine.  It makes no matter where He places me, or how.  That is rather for Him to consider than for me; for in the easiest positions He must give me His grace, and in the most difficult, His grace is sufficient."