Just Another Death

A student died yesterday and this morning in the staff room there was a large debate: to attend the funeral or not. This is Malawi where people die all the time, and yet the custom is to go to any funeral to which you are even remotely connected. Traditionally, even if you do not know the person, if there is a funeral nearby, you go anyways. There should have been no question; the entire school should have attended the funeral.

There were, however, a few minor complications. First, the girl had left school early in the year due to illness. She was admitted into a hospital in Blantyre and had been there for the entire school year. Recently it came to the attention of the school that she was pregnant. School policy is to expel any pregnant students (male or female, as it states in the official school rules) until after the child is born. However, since the girl had left school because she was sick, before it became evident that she was pregnant, there was never any formal expulsion. Hence the dilemma. Was she a Gracious student for whose funeral the entire school should arrive in uniform, or was she an expelled student to whom the school owes no formal obligation?

One teacher argued- if there was no formal expulsion, then she is still our student and we should go to her funeral. The principal countered, yes, but do we want to associate out school with this? Last year when a student died we took all of our students in uniform to the funeral. Do we do the same for this girl? Do we really want to form such a large visible presence at the funeral of a girl who died due to complications from pregnancy? At this, all of the teachers cringed and laughed. In the US, the general attitude is that teens will have sex no matter what you do and the result is that some of them will end up pregnant. It’s not the fault of the school if a girl gets knocked-up. Here the attitude is a bit different and schools are loathe to admit that any of their students ever get pregnant for fear that parents will not send their students to the offending school.

The school eventually decided to send a small delegation of two teachers along with a few students and the condolences (money) they had collected from their classmates. For the whole school to attend would have been inappropriate, but the school cared about the girl and wanted to show some support for her family.

Perhaps my discussion of a student’s death seems too emotionless. Shouldn’t there be students weeping on each others shoulders in classrooms and an emotionally charged day as the school mourns its loss? Perhaps. But, death happens. Here more than anywhere else. Each person deals with it individually and those who knew the girl personally I am sure mourned her in their own way. In a place where death is common, society treats it as such and carries out its well-practiced customs with little surprise. However, amazingly to me, even in the face of such frequency, communities still manage to keep an individual from becoming just another death.

The notations of death are everywhere- in a funeral procession singing loudly down the road and the in the subdued faces of returned students who have been missing for a week.
Earlier this year, the Anglican choir popularized a beautifully catchy tune called Lowani, a song which is traditionally sung at a burial as the body is lowered into the grave. It is morbidly humorous to me that I frequently hear the students merrily singing this song in the corridors and classrooms throughout the day.

The events of this morning spawned an interesting conversation with Mr. Hawonga, Mr. Piyo, and Mr. Chisale about life-expectancies here in Malawi. The teachers were under the impression that the life expectancy in Malawi used to be 45 years (including infant mortality), but has recently dropped to 33 since the AIDS epidemic. Although I am convinced that this is fairly exaggerated, it is interesting to hear what they perceive to be the average length of time a Malawian lives. From life expectancy the conversation moved naturally on to retirement age- 65 for a teacher or 20 years of service, which the teachers all thought was far too old considering that statistics predicted they would be long-dead by that time. And from there to the salaries of teachers in the US- very low I assured them, to which they decided that unappreciated teachers are a problem worldwide.

It was an interesting morning. Teen pregnancy, retirement, death. We even talked about adoption for a while. But, even as two starkly different nations, I think it is better to talk about these common problems we face, rather than hide our superiority be ashamed to admit inferiority. Because, by discussing together the things we find most troublesome to discuss amongst ourselves, we discover our common humanity.