After a relaxing weekend in Binyoni I was raring to go back
to school and continue teaching my P4 class whom I already loved. When the 4 of
us (I, Kya, Siobhan and Katie) arrived at the school we expected everyone to be
in lessons or loudly milling around as we had come to get used to when we
arrive. Instead the school was silent; all the students were in their class
rooms and all the teachers were standing on the steps of the main building. We
headed over to the glum looking teachers and asked what was happening, it
turned out that a teacher’s child had died in the early hours of the morning.
We found out that for the last few days the child had had an
eye infection but had apparently died this morning of hypothermia or a stroke.
The child was 2 years old. The child was in none of our classes; however we
always saw the kid in the mornings as it was in the nursery or hanging around
the staff. We were all quite upset as we headed to our classes to try and
teach.
Upon arriving in my P4 class the usual chorus of ‘WELCOME TO
P4 CLASS, PLEASE FEEL AT HOME’ sounded very muted and forced. My usual reply of
‘Thank you P4 class, how are you?’ was met with a ‘WE ARE SAD TEACHER ADAM’. For the first lesson which was supposed to be
bar graphs in Maths I ended up having to play games with the class and do some
singing instead of work as they were clearly not in the right mind set to work.
After break we had English where I tried to do some light teaching as well as
games, my class also asked me to come to the funeral which would be in the
afternoon. After English I was also asked by the other teachers if I and the
other volunteers at the school would come to the funeral so we said that we
would.
Once we had had lunch at the school we helped the teachers
to organise all the students into a huge line where we would all walk to the
house where the funeral would take place. It took roughly 25 minutes to walk
the whole school to the house of the deceased child. We walked through the
local town/village, up a dirt road and then through a field and plantation
before we arrived at the house. Upon arrival I was greeted by one of my
students (Martin, cousin of the child) who showed me where I would be sitting.
There were already a couple of hundred people there before the school arrived. The
service involved a preacher talking in the local tongue, some singing and then
a bowl was passed around for people to give donations to the family. From the
service we were led into the home’s banana plantation in the garden where the
child was buried after more singing and words from the preacher. The service
was very sad and showed how strong community is in the area. It seemed mad to
me that the child died around 4am that morning and was buried by 4pm that
afternoon. We left as the child was being buried and headed back to the lodge, had
dinner and went to bed.
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