The Funeral

During our first weekend in Zambia, we got word that a nine year old boy from Hope Community School had died of malnutrition and possibly malaria. Only a few days before, we had seen him in the classroom and he played ball with us in the field. It was sobering to say the least. The unanswerable questions began....

Why did this have to happen?
What if our temporary clinic had been in place a few weeks earlier--could we have helped him?
Why are people here going on with life as usual--as if nothing unusual has happened?
What can we do to help at this point?

The headmaster at the school was asked by the family to officiate at the funeral because they had no church and very few relatives. The group from North Park was invited to attend the burial.

The day of the burial we rode in the bus about 4-5 miles outside of the school village on a dirt road that took us deeper into rural Zambia. As we approached the place where the body of the boy would arrive, we passed a small village and then began to see the dirt mounds on the side of the road. Hundreds, thousands of people buried. We learned that when people in Ndola did not have money to purchase a burial site in a more proper cemetary in town, they had to bring the bodies to this location outside of the city.


We continued to drive, half a mile, a mile, farther and farther. On the left the burial sites had been overgrown by weeds and brush. On the right, fresh graves. It seemed we would never reach the end of this field of death. When the bus finally stopped and we got out, we were surrounded by 5 or 6 funerals being conducted simultaneously. Down the hill several workers did nothing but dig new holes for the bodies that were arriving every hour. These hills received as many as 40 new bodies each day.

The sounds of mourners were inescapable. The small signs over the graves indicated most of those buried were under 35 years old, many had not reached their 10th birthday. As we listened to our Zambian hosts, they spoke of the reality of AIDS, malaria and so little access to nutrition and healthcare.

It was somewhere in the midst of all this that the statistics became real. What we had read and researched, was now all around us. And instead of seeing it on TV or in a movie, now we were actually in the picture.