Everything about a death and a funeral in Mozambique

I'm not sure if this entry is 100% finished, but I don't have time to add more, so it'll go up like this. I'm also pretty sure it has terrible grammar, but oh well.

Over the holidays I went with Sambo to visit various members of his very large family. Overall we had a great time, which hopefully I’ll be able to write more about, but there was an unfortunate event that occurred. We spent New Years on Ilha de Inhaca (Inhaca Island), which is where Sambo’s from. While there, we decided to take a bunch of his nieces and nephews of various ages to the beach. Living on an island, most of them know how to swim a little, or else know that they can’t go in deep water. But one niece, Joaninha, had rarely been to the beach, (which no one thought to tell us when we headed out) and therefore didn’t really know where she could or could not play in the water. At one point I was giving a snack to some of them on the beach, and Sambo was playing with others in the water, and neither or us realized that Joaninha wasn’t around.
So I was on the beach eating crackers with some of the kids when all of a sudden one of them was like, “Look, someone passed out!” I turned to see a man carrying a little girl, clearly unconscious, in his arms. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that it could be one of the kids that had come with us until another nephew was like, “That’s Joaninha!” We called Sambo, and the man carrying her laid her on the beach. She’d clearly been vomiting. I tried to think back to CPR from 10th grade health class, but couldn’t remember exactly what you were supposed to do. The man and Sambo pushed on her stomach and a bunch of water/vomit came out of her mouth and nose. She still had a pulse and was breathing a little. They found someone with a 4-wheeler to take her to the hospital.
I took the rest of the kids back to the house, and then went with the older ones to the hospital. When we got there I went in the room where she was. The doctor was cleaning vomit out of her mouth and nose with guaze and some suction thing. Then he put a long tube in her nose, and looked at her, and took it out, and put it and took it out a few more time, and then left it in and hooked it up to an oxygen tank. Joaninha was still unconscious. He declared that she was “out of danger” and left, instructing the nurse to put in an IV. I later found out that he wasn’t a doctor, that a doctor comes a couple of times a week to the island, and that this guy was some kind of technician.
Well we waited around a couple of hours, and the technician came back. He found it “shocking” that she hadn’t woken up yet, and was immediately concerned. He called (phoned, not summoned) a real doctor, then gave her antibiotics and an anti-inflammatory shot. “Out of danger” no longer applied. He now proclaimed that she could either live or die (duh) and that at this point it was still “too early” to say. We rotated who stayed at the hospital, and when Sambo and I were there she woke up! She drank some juice, he gave her a tissue and told her to clean her face and blow her nose, which she did, he asked her where it hurt and she was able to mumble a coherent, logical answer. She was clearly struggling to breathe, so the technician found an (adult-sized) oxygen mask, played around with it trying to figure out how to use it, put it on her, and she passed out again. Another aunt came to stay there during the night, and they planned to transfer her to the mainland early the next morning. Sambo and I went back to his brother’s house and went to bed, relieved.
Sambo got a text early the next morning asking him to come to the hospital. We figured they were getting ready to transfer Joaninha. He went. Soon after I got a text saying that she had died. I went to the hospital. Apparently during the night she had woken up a few times, drank more juice and milk, and even asked to go to the bathroom. And then died.
In Mozambique:
How do you transport a dead body? You put it in the back of a truck along with the passengers. Wrapped in colorful Mozambican cloth.
How do you react if you’re a 25-year-old man and you’ve just been told that your 6-year-old sister died? You don’t. Not at all. Not even a gasp, a dead-drop, a shake of the head, a curse, or a widen or blink of the eyes. You just say thanks for the information, and then you serve yourself a glass of water if you want. No need for anyone to do that for you, you’re a man, it’s not that big of a deal. Granted they had different mothers and I don’t think he had ever lived in the same place at the same time as her and therefore didn’t really know her much, but still.
How do you break it to the other cousins who were at the beach and saw what happened that she died? (All the adults knew of the death already) You wait a few hours, until the kids are being loud and not helping you with the work, and then you say, “Hey! Stop being loud and start being helpful! Joaninha died ok? She’s dead! So shut up and do what I said!” And the kids will shut up and do what you said, and they won’t cry because it’s not the first time someone they knew died because people die all the time.
What about burying the body? In Grandma’s back yard. (next to her sister’s grave, who had died the year before) In a coffin made by the men. A tiny little coffin for a 6-year-old’s body. With the body wrapped in white cloth leaving the face showing. In a grave dug by the men and later filled by everyone, including me. And then everyone takes a flower and plants it above where she was buried.
What is a funeral like? While you wait for everyone to get there, the women start cooking. When “everyone” is there, first the closest family members go look at the body. Then the more distant family members. Then the friends, neighbors, and everyone else look. Then everyone starts singing, and some of the men carry the coffin from inside Grandma’s house to the grave in her yard, that has to be dug the same day as the burial. And everyone keeps singing. And then everyone goes up to put some dirt on, and then when it’s full everyone goes again to plant a flower there. And then the women go back to cooking, and then serving food. Then the non-family go home, and the family stays. The women cook more and most of the men drink. Then you eat more, and cook more, and possibly drink more, and talk with the other family members etc. Repeat for 3 days, adding in sleeping at night. The cooking was fish and rice for all lunches and dinners.
Let’s clarify: by “the women cook,” I mean that the Mozambican women cook, and the white woman is allowed to cut tomatoes, potatoes and onions, as long as the peeling of these vegetables is done for her. But first you must confirm that she is capable of such a task by asking her if she knows how to cut onions. (They really, literally, asked me that.) And by “talk with the other family members” I mean that if you speak Changana (the local African language there) you talk with the other adult family members in Changana (even though you speak Portuguese fluently), and if you don’t speak Changana (me) you play with the kids. So basically after the funeral and burial I had another 3 days of boring patronizing-ness.
But at least here there was no looking for someone to blame, as I’m sure would have happened in the US. So, while it was quite sad at the time, there is very minimal lasting guilt regarding the whole situation, so that’s healthy.