Funeral

The guests were supposed to arrive between 9 and 10am.  Naturally, we got there around 10:30 and were some of the first people there.  The service was supposed to last from 10:30-12:30.  Naturally, it went from 11:45-5pm.

There were probably 700 people there, the local technical school had all the construction students put up bamboo and tarp structures for people to sit under.  A couple schools and NGOs brought in hundreds of chairs but still there were a lot of people sitting on the ground.  Even the local government officials came for the event.

I'm used to funerals in the States where even the closest family tries to stay composed.  But here you're allowed to freely express your grief.  Guests would wail when they came, the students from her school would yell, her sister almost passed out saying goodbye as she lifted her hands and screamed.

The tradition is to have the body spend one night in the home and then be buried the next day, so they brought the coffin out of the house while everybody was singing etc. Being a Christian community, they sang a lot of worship songs filled with "ayayayyayaya"s from the women.  Since English is the overlying language since there are so many tribes in Uganda, most of the service was translated from Acholi to English for us.

Then it was time for the burial.  All 700 of us walked about 10 minutes to a plot of land owned by the family.  We looked like a mass exodus, filling the paths, moving like water around houses and such.  People came to watch, children came to watch.  And, I think I've mentioned a couple times how kids yell "Munu!" when I pass (meaning white person).  Well, in this completely inappropriate time they did it too.  (Obviously they had no idea that it wasn't the time).

So we got to the open grave, sang, and lowed the casket down with rope.


Matthew stayed pretty composed the whole time although you could tell that he had been crying previously.  He spoke and told the whole story of her sickness and death.  I'll summarize  she's always had nosebleeds but they got worse a couple months ago.  She was in and out of the hospital.  When she was at home, she would cuddle up on his lap.  This last time she was sick it was because she had lost so much blood with nosebleeds that her body couldn't keep up and her heart wasn't getting enough flow.

They had to transfuse her but there is no blood bank here.  Her platelet count had become too low.  They tested her relatives and found a donor.  Then, the machine that was monitoring her heart and blood broke on a Friday.  They told Matthew it would be fixed on Monday but that there were no other machines in the hospital.

Over the weekend Matthew was trying to find an ambulance to take her to Kampala but the hospital said one of their vehicles was broken and the other had too many flat tires.  All the other organizations in town had long processes to be able to use their ambulance.  So finally FH got an ambulance from Kampala to come and pick her up.

As they neared Kampala her condition was deteriorating.  They said they had to give another injection and she looked at her dad and said "no more injections."  When they got to the hospital she was in horrible shape, I'm not sure if they had started CPR yet but they knew her heart was failing.  Matthew said that she got the best attention possible, all of the doctors were ready to receive her and all tried to rescue her but it was too late.

I keep thinking how easily we could have helped her in the States.  You can cauterize the veins in the nose to stop the bleeding, you can give her a saline drip to stay hydrated, you can even get plasma from the blood bank to help with clotting.  Unfortunately that just isn't here.  But then I think, if it was God's will for her to go then he may have taken her no matter what medicine she received.

It's just hard to think that she didn't receive the best possible treatment out there.