learning how to grieve

I’m sitting on a mat on the floor, eating oily rice with my fingers and trying not to cry.

A stream of old women walk past to greet me and the girls I‘m sitting with. One has her head resting on my legs and her shirt open as she breastfeeds her newest baby.  Maimuna, my best friend and surrogate sister, is stifling a sob and wiping a tear as she rests her head on my shoulder. I keep shoveling in the food, even though I‘m full and I don‘t like the taste. Maybe it’s a Jewish thing. Grief makes me hungry.

I want to vomit. I want some water. I want fresh air. I want to be anywhere but here.

But this is exactly where I need to be today. I need my Tanzanian friends to teach me how to grieve for a child. I need Maimuna to teach me how to go on living and laughing and working to make this village a better place when a tiny, lifeless body lies before me covered in a shroud. A tiny body that used to be a tiny person I knew, a tiny person I exchanged high-fives with and made funny faces at. I’ve never had to do this before, but my Mamas and sisters are old pros. They will show me how it’s done.

Step one is wailing.

Step two is eating some pilau and accepting that it’s a fact of life.

Step three is going back to the farm because there are weeds to pull and beans to plant.

It’s been a week now since the funeral. The official mourning process is over. But I can’t get past that empty space between step one and step two. The space where you are done crying and done feeling angry and done wanting to vomit, but you can’t yet accept that we live in a world this cruel.

“It’s God’s work,” my Mama keeps saying. “Praise him.”

Those words don’t comfort me; they make it worse. They make me want to scream.

I try to say, “No, Mama, it’s not God’s work. It’s the work of malnutrition and dirty water and broken promises by NGOs and governments and water pumps that have been dry for a year and Mamas that have to carry their babies in the hot sun for hours to fetch water and babies that don’t even have the strength to complain and men who are supposed to be leading this village but actually spend all day in the bar. It’s the work of years of people watching babies die and saying ’it’s just the work of God, what can we mortals do?’ rather than saying ’no, really, what CAN we do?’”

I wanted my words to have an impact, to rally her, to catalyze a movement of angry Mamas that would fight for food security and nutrition, stop blaming God, save the babies and hold the real culprits responsible.

But the Swahili that stumbled out of my mouth sounded feeble and broken. Or maybe my argument was feeble and broken, regardless of the language. Mama just gave me that “Are you seriously questioning God right now?” look, and we switched topics.

We talked about what the harvest might be like this year. We talked about the rains and we whispered in nervous tones about drought. Mama didn’t acknowledge my little rant against the “it’s all part of God’s plan” theory. But if she did, she might have said there’s no time to search for root causes and start a movement. She might have reminded me that there are weeds to pull and beans to plant. Maybe she’d tell me that if we don’t get over this and get our asses back to the farm, more babies will die. And she would be right and I would realize I was wrong.

Time passes slowly in the village, but it passes. The rainy season makes the mountains bloom, bursting into greenness like they are finally waking after months of brown, rocky sleep. My Swahili improves and I get closer to my village friends and slowly, painfully, I start to understand this place a little better. I also start to realize that there are things I’ll never understand.

I came here to change lives and make a small corner of the world a slightly better place. I came here to teach and to mobilize. In the classroom I’ve had fun watching my teenage students gain confidence, beamed as I’ve overheard them explaining important details of HIV/AIDS to their younger friends.  But I also came here to learn.

In the classroom, I am a teacher. At the funeral, I was the newest kid in class. This week I learned how to bury a child and go back to the farm with tears still wet on my cheeks, grateful that the hot sun will dry them.