What Do You Say?

First of all, thanks, again for everybody’s comments on my blog post commemorating Do from Didoro and for the messages on twitter and facebook and email. It always helps me to not feel so alone when walking through hard stuff like that.

We currently work with 34 churches meeting on any given Sunday. We are not able to make it to all of them all the time obviously. So my teammate Melissa does an amazing job of putting together the puzzle of which missionaries go where on which dates called the “Sunday Village Visit Schedule.” So one would think that I would know what was going to happen this past Sunday, but . . .

Plan A - go to Didoro according to schedule

Andy went to church in Didoro’s neighboring village of Nyinyime last Sunday. He met some folks from Didoro who told him about Do’s death. Since Didoro is so far out, he didn’t have time to still go there and make it back home to Dano at a decent time. So he promised folks from Didoro that he would be there next Sunday. Because we have so many possible places to go each Sunday, I wanted to go somewhere else, so there went plan A.

Plan B - go to next week's scheduled church this week and then go to Didoro the following week.

So l decided I would go to Bavule instead. I can always go to Didoro next week. But then God brought plan C to my front gate.

Plan C - help Ngmin-puor from Pen-zan

Ngmin-puor

You may remember my talking about the great literacy night classes going on in Pen-zan. One of the teachers from there is Ngmin-puor (I won’t even provide a pronunciation guide - after 9 years it’s still hard for me to say his name).  He came to my gate while I was still getting ready to head out for church.

He told me about his baby boy Pierre. Pierre had gotten a fever three nights ago. They took the one year old to the nurse’s station in Polebar and tried to find treatment. The nurses there strongly suggested that he bring Pierre to Dano. So Ngmin-puor and his wife and little Pierre all got on a bicycle together to come to Dano Saturday night, but Pierre didn’t make it.

Overcome with grief, they asked for my help in bringing them to Pen-zan (which is not close to Dano, even in a car). So that confirmed my plan C.

The wife was silent all the way home except for an almost inaudible moan from time to time. I didn’t know what to say exactly so I tried to chat a little with Ngmin-puor about the literacy program - thought it might take his mind off of it - or maybe I was thinking of taking my own mind off of it . . . I wish I was better at this.

Dagara cultural aside #1

What should I have said? I mean . . . I can think of some things that I’m supposed to say to an American family that might be going through a tough time like this, but Dagara culture is so different. They see suffering and death all the time. For them, it’s the norm. Of course, it still hurts, but it doesn’t shake their world - it is their world.

So, anyway, when we got to Pen-zan, Ngmin-puor's wife got out of the truck with Pierre still strapped to her back, but with his face covered.  What before had been inaudible turned into the typical moan that a mourning mother might emit here to announce the death of her child to the whole village.

The Pen-zan Christians were worshipping, but the funeral had begun at the same time. So there was all this wailing and moaning just a stone's throw away from the worship service going on.  It felt a bit awkward, like they were performing a worship service for the missionary while their brother and sister were over there crying about the loss of their child.

Dagara cultural aside #2

Dagara culture is very status driven. So one of the ways that they show the importance of someone who has died is by the length of their funeral. A chief might get a three or even four day long funeral. A one year old will usually just get a half day. I was worried this would be what would happen for little Pierre, so . . .

I talked to the meeting Christians about how Jesus welcomed children and how he had to get his disciples to stop 'acting like children' by telling them that they had to have the heart of a child. I reminded them how 'Do' was so humble and didn’t try to get recognition, and I encouraged them to honor little Pierre as Jesus would have.



All this death, and I feel so inadequate to address it all. Burkina has a life expectancy of 53 years. But what does that statistic even mean to Pierre’s parents? I’m sure they expected him to live more than one year. Sure, there is the promise of the afterlife, but the living still have to deal with the separation. What would you have said? Help me out here.  Go ahead, there won't be any consequences, except that maybe I'll have more insight the next time I have to face a situation like this, which could be soon given the way things are here.