Funeral

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How to Bake Cookies in Malawi
Useful with almost any cookie recipe:

Baking Cookies
Baking cookies is actually easier than baking most other things. As with almost anything baked, take a medium-sized sefrier (pot) and grease the bottom. Then pre-heat it thoroughly by sticking a lid on it and placing it over embers for about 10-20 minutes. Take it off the embers, put in cookie dough, leave off the embers for five minutes, put back on the embers for five minutes, then take off again. Open lid, let cool before removing cookies. Or burn the heck out of your hands in your eagerness to eat warm gooey cookies.

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The reason there is cookie baking help for this blog entry is that I have spent a ridiculous amount of my time the last two weeks baking cookies. So I was going to write an entry all about coming back to my village after a long absence and baking cookies for people, and bringing them to my friends and neighbors, and how nice it’s been just to visit with people and chat, which it has been. Then, on Tuesday, absolutely everything was thrown into disarray when I found out that one of my very good friends, a former headmaster of a neighboring school, had passed away quite suddenly that morning.

As an outsider, the culture that surrounds funerals in Malawi can be incomprehensible and frustrating. Here, it is understood that whenever a family member, acquaintance, or person within a ten mile radius of you dies, you must drop whatever you are doing and attend the funeral. When you are managing a building project and your head contractor’s distant cousin dies down in Zomba and everything grinds to a halt for a few days while he travels halfway down the country and back, this is really, really annoying. However, when someone you were close to passes away suddenly and you are shocked beyond rational planning, it’s actually quite convenient to find that everyone has already heard and you don’t have to worry about a thing except packing up and getting out.

This is the first really good Malawian friend I have lost in country, and one of the stranger things about the whole process has been going through the whole experience of loss and grieving from the perspective of two cultures. On the one hand I feel the loss, and internally deal with the loss, the way I have always done, as an American. On the other hand I have had to go through the whole public experience of saying goodbye in a Malawian context, which has brought with it it’s own set of emotions.

Malawian funerals have always been a bit overwhelming and incomprehensible to me. The process of grieving is so complex and personal that I think to understand it as any sort of outsider is always going to be difficult. However, living as a part of a village, Peace Corps volunteers attend a lot of funerals, which basically involves walking into a mass of wailing, sobbing people you don’t know and trying not to do anything completely culturally insensitive and stupid.

Attending the funeral of someone I was actually close to though, I think I got a bit better perspective, and although I spent all of Tuesday dreading it, being at the funeral was actually very helpful and comforting. Funerals tend to be a two-day affair. On the first day, everyone gathers inside and outside the house, sitting with the next of kin all day and night, and on the second day, everyone piles into pickups and heads out to the deceased’s home village for the burial.

Etiquette of the funeral dictates that close family and friends sit inside the house surrounded by a constant company of women or men (women and men stay separate at funerals) who alternate singing and sobbing and occasionally somehow do both at the same time. The yard is filled by a large crowd of those who knew the deceased to varying levels, who mostly sit around and chat. When you first arrive at a funeral, you go inside, greet the family, express your condolences, make a bungled attempt to suavely slip them money, and head outside.

So it was that after leaving my site at 5:30 Wednesday morning, and somehow getting a ride with a trucker who was in the middle of traveling from Durban to Lusaka I ended up at the funeral. I promptly went inside, sat with the family (also good friends) for a while, then went outside. Since the person who died was a Head Teacher at a Peace Corps school, there were four volunteers at the funeral. So, instead of sitting awkwardly surrounded by strangers as we normally do, we all sat together in a small group and chatted.

Which was nice. We would go from trading anecdotes about the Head Teacher to talking about how much we missed blueberries to talking about bunnies (aren’t they just so cute?) back to anecdotes. Which, I suddenly realized, was exactly what everyone else was doing. At one point I looked over and noticed a group of women playing peek-a-boo with a new baby. Which got me to thinking that in a country where travel is inanely expensive, funerals, where richer members of the community are expected to drive people around for free, might be one of the few times one has for re-uniting with people you haven’t seen in a while.

The coffin arrived from the hospital about midday and everyone went hysterical, crying and sobbing and screaming. None of us sobbed or screamed, but we did cry, and in a strange way it was almost nice having people around you falling to pieces, it was like a clear indicator “it’s okay, now you are supposed to be sad.”

After the body arrives there is a viewing, which is optional. Members of the church stand in two rows singing around the coffin, which is comforting, and you can file past to view the body. I actually did, just because everything was so sudden, I simply could not comprehend that this was really happening, and I thought if I saw the body, I might. In fact, I did not. Two seconds after seeing the body I spotted someone in the crowd who looked like him and on impulse thought it was him, and then consciously had to remind myself that this was no longer possible.

After the viewing, everyone processes down to the burial, and people stand and give speeches about how wonderful the person was. Then, and this part I still don’t understand, a man stands and talks about how much money and food were donated in condolence, listing exactly who gave how much and then stating the total. I suppose this is to show how much the person was loved, that people are willing to give so much, and that the reading aloud ensures that those who are able give more will, thereby supporting a family, who, in Malawi at least, actually do need the monetary support to pay for the coffin and transport and burial, but still.

On a personal level, the cemetery where the burial took place is in one of the most beautiful spots I’ve ever seen in Malawi. It’s on a beach backed by mountains, and the lake in that area is just completely crystal blue, while the mountains are this really stark green caused by a dense growth that’s almost jungle-like. I’m still not at all sure why I found that comforting, but I did.

After the funeral, we (that is the PCVs) went to the nearest volunteer’s house, where the executive decision was made in favor of comfort food, so we whipped up some Mac & Cheese from a care package and went to bed promptly at eight. Since then, I’ve still been trying, extremely unsuccessfully, to wrap my head around the idea that the person in Malawi who I knew as the most full of life is now gone, but then, that’s the nature of loss anywhere I suppose.

For now, it is nice to know that when I get back to site I’ve got a few dozen more cookies to bake, and quite a few more people who are going to be really happy to chat with me all afternoon, and who are going to make me feel extremely blessed to know them, and to have a few more months to spend with them.