This last week was a bit more laid back than in the last few months. All the eMi staff have arrived and are with interns out on project trips, both here in Kampala and in Kenya. One new long term volunteer will soon go to Kenya on a different project for 6 weeks. We will really miss her. Rose is a great lot of fun.
My week, the exciting part, involved meeting with administrators at International Hospital Kampala, to attempt to find a food source connection for In Need Home, an NGO, which is in their neighborhood. The administrator was around, but busy, so I get to go back next week. The other visit that same day was to a shipping container company to see if they had 2 old 40' containers to donate to the same NGO. After waiting for an hour (I arrived at the beginning of lunch time), Richard met with me to explain their community service program. They do indeed give containers to be used as classrooms, but have already done it for 2011. When they donate, they transport and situate it on the plot, paint, install wiring, put in furniture and class supplies.
I will go again to see the lady who is in charge of selecting the projects and see if I can persuade her to make the 2012 project In Need Home. The bad news was that any damaged containers that can't be used (which is what I was thinking they might have to give away) are actually repaired and/or recycled at the main shop in Mombasa. So that was good news for the environment.
Yesterday Florence and I had a great conversation - it weirded her daughters out a bit - about what will happen to our bodies when we die. I told Florence that if she died, I'd wrap her in a sheet, get a special hire and take her to her family/village to be buried. She broke out into laughter and wiping the tears from her eyes, said she didn't want me to go to prison for trying to be helpful.
She then explained the procedures here. If someone dies in the home, without having been ill and treated by a doctor, there is always the suspicion of murder! The ones to be suspected would be me and even her daughters, if they were living here, or even had been to visit the day before.
So, the proper sequence of events is this:
Find dead body
Go to nearest police and tell them.
They give a paper that is taken to the nearest big gov't hospital.
Hospital sends an ambulance, does autopsy. When cause of death is determined, and if not murder, then they will call next of kin to pick the body, issuing a death certificate.
The certificate is taken to police to get a letter authorizing the transport of the body.
THEN, the body can be taken to the village for burial. The friends/family will visit the body, in a living room, maybe even sleep in the room that night with the body if the burial is the next day.
Burials are a huge deal. All the available family come. In Florence's case, this could be up to 100 blood kin. In addition, all the friends, neighbors, others in the village, will all come to say good-bye, maybe tell stories, etc. There will be at least one huge meal for all of them (think about slaughtering a bull, plus all the vegetables, matooke, etc) as well as tea available all day and night.
With all that information, my plan still looked best. So I told her what I wanted if she found my body. Wrap me in a sheet, take me to her village, dig a vertical hole, drop me in and plant a tree over my head. Florence again went into peals of laughter. So I revised it a bit, saying if I was dying, we would have time to go to the village, get the hole dug and I could go be near it. When I died, she could just nudge me into it.
Florence asked if I really wanted her to spend the rest of her life in prison. Of course not I replied. Well then, she said we have to do it the right way. I can call your American Embassy and they can fly your body home to your family.
Now I hadn't even considered that the US embassy would even need to know, but it does make sense. So I will ask them what the procedures are. But, I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that the embassy does not pay for the transport.
So, I will still be buried here. However, I still want it to be simple. I couldn't convince Florence to agree to do the burial my way, even with giving written instructions. She said if she was in charge, I'd just have to put up with it, and besides, it would just be the body anyway. Their last chance to do something nice for me.
Anyway, still a conversation in process, but I'm learning a lot more about Ugandan culture. It is telling that murder is the first thought when someone dies unexpectedly. Guess it is to be expected given all the wars these people have lived through in the past 50 years, with the average age of a Ugandan in the mid 20's and 48 years is considered to be old.
Hope you are well and laughed at all the information in this note as much as Florence and I have. BTW I expect to live to be 102, so don't be making any travel plans on my account.
Blessings,
Maggie
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