Celebrating in Site

As a holdover from their ancestor worship beliefs, families here periodically commemorate the deaths of loved ones. Seven days, six months, and one year seem like particularly important intervals for celebrating. This past weekend marked the half year anniversary of Nelson’s death. He was our neighbor and landlord. His widow, Marcelina, came by months ago to invite us to the event and ask for a three month advance on our rent; apparently there are lots of expenses associated with hosting this type of affair, mainly for feeding out of town relatives. We didn’t know what exactly to expect for this funeral reprise, but given the theme of death we imagined something dour. It turned out to be a raucous happening, more in the frat party genre, with guests focused mainly on inebriation. We weren’t too surprised as we had noticed two youths carrying some oversized speakers on their heads to our neighbor’s yard earlier that morning, and we did remember something in retrospect about Marcelina needing to buy lots of corn to brew the party staple pombe, a homemade beer Janet describes as semi-sweet burning fermented grossness. At some point Marcelina borrowed our knife to slice up a goat to barbeque. It turns out there was a more solemn sunrise ceremony at the cemetery involving cleaning the gravesite and covering it in flowers, but it must have happened very early since Luc was up at 6am, and everyone had already returned. We didn’t spend too much time at the party, as it turns out we had our own impromptu celebration for our Peace Corps Malawi neighbor Oliver. He lives in the bush with no public transportation to and from site, just a daily ambulance to hitch with. His friends had planned a big surprise birthday party for him and invited us, but Africa had a surprise of its own. A week of heavy rain left the already sketchy 25 km dirt road from his village to the district capital impassable, leaving all the would-be guests partying at our buddy Jordan’s house and Oliver celebrating his birthday by himself. Luckily thanks to a transnational foot path that connects our site to Oliver’s, he just biked to our house (which took under 2 hours on his fancy Peace Corps issued South African Trek which Luc tries not to covet). It’s easy to impress volunteers from the bush, we forget about the little things like electric lights, our toaster oven for baking cakes (Janet improvised an orange chocolate chip cake of amazingness, complete with birthday candles), watching movies on our laptop computer, charging cell phones, and refrigeration (which we used for making lime Jello); but these are all luxuries and special treats for Oliver. So as we enjoyed our subdued celebration of Oliver’s special day, our neighbors drank and danced the afternoon away, occasionally spilling over into our yard with their off balanced gyrations and incomprehensible speech in slurred dialect. A heavy afternoon shower dampened the mood next door and finally a power outage finished off the celebration, which we didn’t mind since everyday life here already generates noise beyond ideal relaxation levels and we weren’t anticipating sleeping well with hundreds of people partying fifty feet outside our window.