Funeral

Friday night we heard that a neighbor’s wife passed away.  Saturday morning as we were finishing breakfast Adama’s mother came to the door and said he should get ready to go to the visitation.  He said I could come if I wanted or could stay home. 

I decided to go, realizing, but not fully, that it would be a different kind of experience.  We hopped on the new motorcycle and followed Mouonton, with another neighbor, down the bumpy red road.  Following Adama’s mother made us go faster than what Adama ever took me! 

                We rode until we got to streets downtown I’d never seen before, and then kept going.  I thought we were only going next door. 

                After a 20-minute ride we were parking in a cluster of motorcycles under a tree and near a tent crowded with men.  Mouonton pulled tissues out of her purse and handed them to us.  Adama unfolded his and touched his eyes (due to the occasion or the wind of the motorcycle ride?)  He said I would go with his mother.  I guess he stayed outside with the men. 

                Our neighbor, Mouonton and I entered the courtyard and passed benches of women dressed in all colors.  We found ourselves where they were cooking an enormous pot of rice over an open fire – 50+ lbs for a guess – and were given very short wooden stools to sit on.  I guess it was too hot outside, so we moved up the steps into a long corridor. 

                We sat there, children beside us on a mat, with the woman Mouonton must have known best in that gathering.  I don’t know who she was, although she may have been one of the neighbor’s other three wives. 

                They sat and talked; I sat and watched.  Some other women came and sat on the floor, one with a smiling baby.  

                Every time men filed through the far end of the corridor, the gathering at this end got up and turned as if to exit.  When they had carried the corpse through, we sat again on the low stools.  Some women followed the coffin and we watched silently as they wailed. 

                I had been told that people only put their chin on their hands when they are burdened with some great trouble.  Here, people rested head on hand, were sorrowful, and were also okay with smiling at the baby. 

The baby, for her part, was happy with life and interested in the different colored “tu baboo.”  She played with my finger and I finally asked her mother if I could hold her, “C’est bon?”  The mother changed her diaper: a cloth held on with a string and covered with pink cotton shorts. 

At the other end of the corridor a woman sat down, sobbing, and some people gathered around her.  We were quiet. 

                The woman we were sitting with was dressed in blue, with the usual matching headpiece and long gold earrings.  Her daughter came in and toyed with the earrings.  Another girl, also about 7 years old, came with her, and they looked at me.  They must have known Deborah, because Mouonton told them something about me in relationship to Deborah, so they would know who I was.  They started whispering – obviously about me.  I watched, smiled, and pretended I was whispering to the baby.  The daughter hid under her mother’s chair; the other girl grinned. 

                Another mother and baby joined us.  This baby was scared of me, although the mother (seeing the comfort of the other baby) tried to get her to come to me.  We all sat there, having already sat for two or three hours with little concept of time.

 I looked out the door toward the boiling pot of rice and this time I saw Adama.  We stood up, shook hands with the women there, and walked back past the benches of colorful ladies.  Outside the courtyard, the crowd of men was much smaller.  Adama maneuvered the motorcycle from the cluster and we hopped on, me doing the usual “make sure your skirt isn’t in the mechanism.” 

Before I came, I remember being uncertain about the pleasure of motorcycle riding.  Now I find it to be fun, although – not being used to it – it can cause soreness the way horse riding can. 

On the way home we stopped at a fruit and vegetable market.  And when we reached the suburbs I got the usual “tu baboo!”

After lunch at home there was a commotion inside the neighbors’ clay fence. 

I went to the door and all of a sudden a stone came speeding toward me.  It was Adama, knocking a snake off the clay fence.  While I didn’t hear his warning, the stone fortunately fell at my feet as I gaped at the neighbor man and Adama beating the snake with sticks and stones.  Aicha (visiting that day), Deborah, and Mouonton ran over.  After the snake was dead, Mouonton beat it, too.  I guess it was the first snake they’ve found since they moved here ten months ago. 

  Later I saw a chicken dragging what looked like a rope, but was really its snake dinner.