There are few sounds I have heard in my life as horrifying as the Ni-Vanuatu crying for someone who has died. Crying doesn’t quite cover it actually, and to say wailing is really only coming close. Only a few days after arriving at site, I woke up to this sound at 2:30 in the morning. That previous night after dinner I heard that a boy named Anderson had a really bad case of malaria and had gone to see him at the health center. He was really out of it but had no fever and was taking Coartem, the drug that the study had just proven was a really good treatment for malaria, so like everyone else, I assumed after a good night sleep he would be much better in the morning. Waking up to this horrendous sound was alarming and confusing but quickly I came to my senses and realized that based on the location it was coming from, Anderson must have died. My heart sunk of course, but especially because Anderson was a really cute, sweet little boy, one of the few children here with a few manners. I woke up my host family and we all headed to their house where, until daylight, I sat in a room far too small to comfortably accommodate both the dead body and the intense crying.
There is a lot of culture surrounding death in Vanuatu so I am glad in some ways to have been able to experience it but hopefully this will have been the saddest and also most frustrating week of my two years here. Anderson was four years old and had only been diagnosed with malaria the day before when he started his first of three days of treatment. Even if I, or anyone else, had recognized his incoherence the night before as a sign of cerebral malaria or some more serious disease, the health center was not stocked with an intravenous or suppository treatment that would have been needed. The nurses had never even heard of cerebral malaria or bacterial meningitis or any of the other possible reasons for his death. Why? Well that’s just a small portion of what made the situation so frustrating.
The next day began what I suppose is the Ni-Vanuatu version of a visitation. After someone dies, people from all around, whether they knew the person or not, are required to come share their condolences in this form of hysterical crying. There are always people whom for them it is obviously fake and just hold their tea towel over their eyes rather than actually using it to wipe tears. On the flip side there are people who cry so intensely that they scream and hit not just the dead body but the closest family members who sit beside it. The mass of people surrounding the immediate family changes as people come and go from other villages but the crying only dies down every once in a while until somebody new comes and they are required to do it all over again.
It seems really weird to us to be forced to cry so hard for someone we didn’t know as well as to be forced to cry at certain moments and I have always been too distracted by its strangeness at other funerals to actually feel sad. Now after having experienced one where for people close to me the emotion was very real, it in some ways it makes more sense than our custom of trying to hold it together at a funeral and then crying alone in your house for the following weeks. After this insane catharsis of emotion for a few days they seem to in some ways have gotten out everything that they needed and after about a week or two his mother was even smiling again. It probably helps too that they seem to be less affected by death than we are and are able to more readily accept it as a part of life. My guess is this is either because it happens more often or because they are so religious, but then again this is also a culture where children and family members disappear to other islands for years and adoption or essentially just giving away of children to other families is really common. Maybe they are less attached or emotional but whatever it is, it seems to make them way more able to handle the loss of a close family member. You wouldn’t think this on the first day when you see them crying as if their world was just ending but in the end they accept it and move on I think more quickly than I would be able to.
So for the first day the crying continues as people continue to come “share their sorry” as it would be put in Bislama until finally the pastor comes and does a small funeral like service and eventually the body is wrapped in layers of calico and mats to be buried. The uncles of the deceased are responsible for doing this as well as digging the grave which in this case was right in front of the boys house. Eventually in one last fit of crying, we all throw a handful of dirt on top of the grave, shake hands with the family who line up beside it and go eat the cow that was killed that morning.
The kids here absolutely love the Mardi Gras beads I give them whenever they show up in packages and one thing I will hopefully never forget about my time here is that Anderson liked his so much that he was buried in them; one strand of red and then the big white ones, because he was so sweet that I gave him two.
For multiple reasons I was so glad when that day was over, however in terms of custom it was just the beginning. Vanuatu tradition says that no one in the family, which is usually the entire village, is allowed to work for five days following a death and we were all supposed to stay at the boy’s house for these five days, only leaving to gather firewood or food to eat from the garden. For those five days all three meals had to be eaten there along with family worship which is more or less a small church service every afternoon before dinner. All the women considered a mama of the boy had to wear the same dress they were wearing when he died for the entire five days, luckily this actually didn’t get too stinky, and the men got to drink lots and lots of kava. Throughout this week people who couldn’t make it on the first day came to cry for Anderson and as if having the dead body around on the first day wasn’t enough, his clothes were hung above his grave throughout the week. It was all very overwhelming and got to the point where practically every time a rooster crowed, which is frequently, I froze hoping it wasn’t wailing I was going to have to hear all over again.
On the fifth day another cow was killed and there is a custom exchange between the aunts and the mamas of the dead. For the entire fifth day the two groups of women were not allowed to be in the same area leading up to this exchange, each staying in separate yards making food for the opposite group. On days such as these lap lap and big pieces of root crop and random cow parts are all put in a hole together and covered with hot stones to cook it like an oven. I was not informed of this exchange which was pretty much just calico and a few island dresses for Andersons close family so having not brought anything I hid amongst the men, utilizing my third gender privilege as a white woman. Then for the following weeks leading up to the one month anniversary of his death, his mother was not allowed to leave their yard and we continued having family worship every evening followed by dinner at their house with all their mamas wearing black island dresses.
Number two reason why this was the most frustrating week ever: The boy had malaria. The boy died. So since malaria spreads amongst people shouldn’t we all be worried about malaria? Well that would make too much sense. Instead we are going to say that because Anderson was what we would consider an illegitimate child (not sure if you noticed I haven’t mentioned anything about his father) it was not malaria but black magic that killed him.
Belief in black magic is huge in Vanuatu which can be really interesting or in this case actually kind of dangerous. Since everyone was afraid of the black magic they all wanted to sleep together in the same place, which in this case meant outside on mats without nets or blankets, at the house of the boy who died of malaria. Luckily it soon got cold enough that people either covered themselves or moved inside under the nets but they its times like this where my role as a health volunteer seems so necessary but futile at the same time. They needed someone to tell them that what they were doing wasn’t a good idea and I did, that it is a health risk to ignore malaria as the cause of death but they were too worried about black magic to think of anything else and in trying to be culturally appropriate and not call their belief stupid like I wanted to, I just made everyone put bug spray on every night. Instead of sitting around not doing work for those five days we should have been cleaning the area, covering up any standing water and promoting the use of mosquito nets but saying so would have been culturally insensitive. Only in one on one conversations could I share my belief that it was malaria and even then most people couldn’t accept this and we had to agree to disagree, making my role again seem useless.
Also, in that week I learned way more about black magic than I ever thought they would share with me. Who can do it and who cant and how, if a kingfisher bird flies on your left it means black magic is going to happen around you. Somebody who was at health center even claims that he heard footsteps the moment Anderson died as if the person doing the black magic was running away after he finally killed him. Since people who do black magic also turn themselves into animals to get close to the person they are trying to hurt, men stayed up every night, circling the village, ready to kill any animal they didn’t recognize as one of ours. One night a large man was supposedly seen running into the bush which led to another alarming wake up in the middle of the night to our elder immersed in really intense fervent prayer right outside my house, protecting me from the evil spirits that were lurking. And just when I thought the whole thing couldn’t get any weirder, god did confirm that it was in fact black magic. Somehow he even came up with a name but we are still awaiting a meeting with that person to hear his side of the story.
Finally, on the one month anniversary of Andersons death, we had another day of celebration with another dead cow (red meat is really exciting and must always be mentioned) and finally his mamas are free to go about their normal lives and activity.
Silver lining of the whole experience: I got to make steak when a joke with my papa led to him actually bring me an huge hunk of meat from the cow killed the first day and even though I had to sneak away at times to stay sane, it has all brought me a lot closer to my village as we all went through it together.
