On the Wednesday before Christmas, we got out of bed in the early hours of the morning to finish last minute preparations for a funeral. A member of the church was 43 years old when she passed a week earlier, succumbing mentally and then physically to the HIV virus which effects so many lives here in South Africa. We had stayed up for hours the night before decorating the church and preparing the program, while many people from the community spent the evening in her homestead singing and sharing stories until three in the morning. The week between her passing and her funeral saw us holding prayer meetings in her home every night, piling up to fifteen people in the back of the old pickup truck to drive the flooded dirt roads out to her home, across the street from our second church building in Gubethuka. The Wednesday morning was incredibly hot and the church was already packed, the ceiling fans and open windows doing little to stifle the oppressive heat. People trickled in during the entire four hour service, and we gave up our seats about halfway through along with all the other girls our age from the church, in order to sit in the back room and listen from there. The singing was loud, boisterous and emotional, many family members shared and many others got up to sing. The whole thing finished with a single file dance out of the church to loud music with a quick beat. We walked the length to where her grave had been dug and spent the time trying to stand under shaded trees or under our friend’s umbrellas to find some relief from the sun. The Mama’s in the church had been cooking all day and we helped with the other girls our age to pass out dishes to everyone there, and then proceed to wash them all in buckets on the ground. The day had more joy than sorrow, with most people attending countless funerals like this during the year, young and old alike.
Isaiah and Mercy, as the pastoring couple of the church, bore the majority of the load for preparing and planning the funeral process. The entire church contributes the food, a meeting held after a normal sunday service to volunteer for what each person would buy, with the Mama’s arriving at the house as early as 5 am in order to have the food ready by the time the funeral was over. The men in the church dig the grave, and the people from the community sit under trees, singing impromptu hymns.
It’s hard to explain at times the things we are learning or the specific tasks we are doing. Sometimes our role as interns is simply to be present and other times its more clear what our tasks are. I don’t know how to share what it felt like to be a part of a Zulu funeral, or to sit in the back room of a church and listen to the music filling the air. We are learning, changing and adapting to be a part of this community, serving alongside these people and discovering what it really means to be the united body of Christ.
