Just Another Day

Wednesday, we attended our first memorial service in South Africa. The memorial service was for a young teacher who had died a week earlier. One major difference between South Africa and the US is that it is culturally acceptable to attend a funeral or memorial service even if you have never met the deceased or even if you don’t know anyone who is related to him or her. Here, such events can be transformed from sober, morbid experiences to lively community proceedings.

Our supervisor stopped by our house in the morning at about 9:00 (this was not unusual because she was also there to check in on the guy she paid to repair our fridge [which deserves its own blog posting….]). Upon greeting us, our supervisor informed us we would be attending the memorial service that morning. When we later walked to the office together we found out that the service would begin at 11:00, which was fine because at that point it was about 10:30. At one point our supervisor left the room for a few minutes, and one of our other three co-workers (all of them are women in their late 20’s and/or early 30’s) remarked that she wouldn’t want to go to the memorial service if she were us. She asked one of the other women how long she thought the service would last. We gulped when the answer was 5 HOURS.

Led by our supervisor, we left the office at about 11:40 to begin the 15 minute walk to the community hall where the service would be held. When we arrived we could tell that it was standing room only inside: about 30 people meandered outside the hall and some were crowding the doorway. Through the small spaces between the crowd we could see that the hall was packed with about 300 people, all of whom appeared to be singing and dancing along with the minister on stage. Considering how hot it was, we were somewhat relieved that we wouldn’t be able to fit inside the hall and could, instead, remain in the shade. How naïve…..

When the first song ended, our supervisor turned to us and said something to the effect of “let’s make our way inside.” When she said this I (Matt) almost laughed because there was clearly no room inside and how could we possibly get past the 30 people in front of us in the doorway. But oh how the crowd parted for the “visitors.” We first slowly walked down the center aisle looking for seats but, not surprisingly, there were none. We kept walking forward. And everyone started looking at us. But we kept going forward. Forward. Forward. Awkwardly. When we arrived near the front we both helplessly looked at our supervisor. There were no seats so we should go back outside, right? Another woman helpfully offered, “go up on the stage.” Swell idea!

There we were, walking on stage to join the ministers, the speakers, and all the other important people in attendance of this man’s memorial service. We were both speechless. With eye contact we both told each other the same thing: AWKWARD!

After about 2 hours and 5 or 6 speakers we left EARLY, again all eyes turned upon us. So ended our first memorial service. The funeral is this Saturday…….