Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Death and burial in Salone

Every week and sometimes several times a week, there’s a funeral parade that goes past my office, there’s lots of people marching, a band playing and the likelihood of a feast (provided by the relatives) for the mourners to look forward to at the end.

In West Africa, how you are mourned and buried is important-it shows off the wealth you had in your lifetime, as well as the wealth of your relatives now you’re gone, it’s also looked on as a celebration of your life and all you’ve done and achieved.

The stark reality hit close to home recently- a friend who is soon to depart Salone inherited a caretaker who lived and worked at his compound when he arrived here sometime ago. This caretaker is a very elderly gentleman, with almost nothing to his name, in fact, so little that his only home/shelter was a metal roofed shack (at least one side open to the elements), that the landlord of this property had been persuaded to construct for him to stay in. Recently, the caretaker came down with an illness so severe that he needed to go into hospital. However, the hospital needed various forms filled in and payments for registration before it can accept patients into the hospital, after several attempts to get into hospital, it was finally managed, as the result of the ‘white man’ paying these fees for the caretaker. After this, various other fees are needed to keep someone in hospital- for daily food, water, medicines and cleaning, although these are much lower. Compared to US costs for health care, it’s pretty cheap here (possibly a totally cost of 40-50 GBP or 80-100 USD at current exchange rates to get someone into hospital and then looked after and hopefully healed after a couple of weeks in hospital), but for local (unskilled) wages of 4,000-5,000 Leones per day (that’s about 80pence to 1 GBP) it’s a fortune. Even for a mid ranking civil servant, that’s at least two-thirds of a month’s wages just to get into hospital and be looked after there.

Back to the issue of burial and death, my friend went to try and find the family of the caretaker, who apparently live up country, but because they wouldn’t gain anything through is death, except lots of bills and expenses, so really didn’t want to know/be identified, which is so sad.

An interesting debate/set of comments was sent in to a BBC article on this subject in 2003- whether it’s worth paying for a large funeral for someone:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3246228.stm

What is also sad, is that people are prepared to spend so much more on the death of a relative than on keeping them well while they’re alive. The social pressures for a ‘big’ funeral are huge, in other places in West Africa, keeping the body on ice for a while is done as a status symbol- the longer you can afford to pay the morgue fees to keep the body there, the richer you are. The problem comes when the dead are celebrated at the expense of the living, or people refuse to acknowledge relatives for fear of having to pay the expenses of a funeral, let alone those for health care. It’s true that each culture and each community within a culture has its own traditions to keep up, but I don’t think these traditions for the dead should be undertaken at the expense of the living.

posted by Nenya @ 5:10 pm

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