Gone too young

A mother’s wailing and shrieking.  Women gathered in solemn, scarf-covered huddles.  Tears shed.  A frantic alkalo.  Gele-geles and donkey carts arriving full of mourners.  A fallen body.  Men congregated around it.    Phone calls being made.  A boy has died.  Mamut Mbye.  A grade 8 student who had just returned from school.  He had climbed a large baobab tree near the primary school to harvest its last few fruits.  Somewhere, somehow he lost his footing in the tree and fell to his death.  I hope he died on impact.  I also hope that he was checked for signs of life in case he didn’t.  Either way, it all happened very fast, yet so slowly…

I was meeting with a teacher at school and got up to walk across the grounds to talk to Abdou in his classroom.  I heard the too-familiar wailing and crying that women do when a death occurs.  I pray it’s an old person whose time it was to go.  I go in Abdou’s class and we start discussing something when another teacher pulls him outside.  He comes back and whispers to me that Mamut Mbye passed away.  I thought I must have heard wrong.  There are a lot of names that are similar to Mamut.   Maybe it was an old man I didn’t know.  I sure hoped so.  Abdou looked distressed and said he’d be right back, but my instincts told me to follow him out of the room.  I walked across to the teachers quarters where I waited for them to return.  They did, and confirmed that it was the young man I feared it to be.  Mamut.  Always a friendly guy.  A little shy, intelligent, caring.  I got a little annoyed with him a while back for stealing a dictionary from the library and writing his name on it, then apparently trying to sell it.  But I forgave him.  We all make mistakes.

I finally peek over the school wall to see what’s going on.  A body is covered in a sheet at the base of the nearest baobab tree.  Many men are standing in its shade, discussing, calling loved ones, crying, praying, staring.  I am fighting the urge to go over and check for his pulse and breathing, but I remember what Peace Corps has told me—don’t intervene in situations like this.  I pray someone has checked him and that help is on the way.  After too long, a junky car rattles up and two men, a police officer, and a man with a (medical?) briefcase get out.  I’m staring in disbelief as they all take their time to greet everyone before slowly approaching the body.  The policeman (…not the doctor???) lifts the sheet and glances at Mamut.  Finally the “doctor” unzips his bag and pulls out a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff.  He kneels over the body for a minute, then gets up and covers the body again.  He’s dead.  It’s at this point that I start crying.  I realize there’s no more hope.  He’s gone.  His father is escorted away by two villagers after breaking down at the sight of his dead son.  An ambulance never comes.  Was one even called?  

People from surrounding villages arrive, the body is lifted onto a cart and wheeled to the mosque.  The men go with it; the women sit in the family’s compound.  I go to join them and watch the proceedings from a distance.  No one really speaks.  A few muttered greetings, cries from a baby, sniffles from us all.  We watch and wait, watch and wait.  The men pray and gather around the body, now covered in a ceremonial blanket.  They kneel, stand, and carry Mamut away for burial.  We continue to wait in silence.  They return finally and it’s all over.  As we all walk home, we hear a wheezing, almost choking sound coming from a nearby compound.  The mother runs out, wailing, screaming her lament for her lost child.  We hear her distant cries the whole way home. 

A life taken too early, too suddenly.  Although this whole process was for me just waiting around for hours, it was over too fast.  Just this afternoon he was climbing a tree and now he’s lying in the cemetery, underground, lifeless.  I’m definitely still in the disbelief stage.  May we all learn to accept this tragedy as God’s will and find peace in our hearts.  God bless Mamut Mbye’s soul, and may he rest in peace.

I wrote this on Tuesday, February 10, after I got home from the funeral.  I had never taken part in a funeral in The Gambia before and I couldn't remember anything that I learned in training about funerals.  Usually when I have a confused cultural moment, I go to my host family or to Abdou.  This time I was at school and all the teachers left me there.  Luckily, I have a female teacher at my school so I just followed her.  It was hard to follow cultural norms in a moment like that and I am so thankful Binta was there to guide me.  I was numb, in shock, and wouldn't have known whether to go home, stay at school, go to the family compound, or go to the mosque.  Later, Abdou told me that women are expected to stay away from the body of a dead person;  I shouldn't have even been watching from afar.  I had no clue.  But I couldn't bring myself to move, until Binta took me to the compound where all the village women were sitting.  Even then I was waiting to go join the men in prayer, or maybe go to the burial, or do any action of condolence,  but it never happened.  We just sat together and waited for the men to take care of it all.  Then the next day, things went back to normal.  I still think this whole thing was just a bad dream.  But like I wrote above, my God help us understand and accept what happened.