Another funeral - the 100 day commemoration

Have been off the net for awhile so am posting some stuff I wrote already

4-22-07

Well here I still am. Yesterday a neighbor and three others took me to the pick up spot for my trip up to the remote mountains. But by 5pm (sunset is at 6pm) no one had showed up and everybody figured that nobody would show up that late. It's about a 5-hour trip and the last three hours are mostly through forest so most of the trip would be in the dark. Generally people don't like to travel in the dark because there could be a landslide or a tree down or some other problem that is more difficult to deal with in the dark.

Fortunately I had the cellphone number of a student in town who is from the area so I texted him and by 8pm he had arranged with another driver who is going up tomorrow to pick me up at the same pick up spot around 2:00pm today. Sigh! I hope it happens. 2pm is a hot time of day to be hanging around a rural intersection... That spot is abut 5 km from my village.

Meanwhile the 100-day funeral is gearing up. The main event will be at 3pm today so I will just barely miss it. But last night I was able to hang around and talk with a bunch of the folk here. There are dozens of relatives from outside the area here to help. But of course they all have to be fed too so some ladies have been making cake for three days now - for coffee breaks and for newly arriving folk. They killed two cows so lots of local ladies were here during the evening and night helping cut up meat. The men did the butchering. The lights went out shortly before dark. We had two new fancy emergency lights with LED bulbs and that helped. There were also two kerosene pressure lamps. Somebody went and borrowed a small gasoline generator that cranked out 1300 watts. They just plugged it into the wall and it ran everything except the water pump. Since the dishwashers eventually ran out of water, somebody had to go around and unscrewed half the lights so that the pump could be turned on.

Many of the relatives are from cooler mountain areas so they just spread some big mats out on the floor in the house and on the terrace and in a couple of open huts. Quite a few few chose to sleep out in the open where it was cooler.

Kids. I remember as a kid at family gatherings how much fun we had running around with our cousins, more or less unsupervised by adults who were all busy. Well they do here too only there are a lot more of them! Adults generally ignore them until somebody cries, or, like yesterday, several preschoolers decided to have a screeching contest inside the house to see who could hurt the others' ears the most. Some adult quickly intervened :-)

This morning there’s a group putting little chunks of meat (beef) on skewers and sticking the ends of several skewers into pieces of banana tree trunk to be grilled. Others are preparing chickens. Another group is grating coconut to use to get the oily milk used in cooking. Others are still cutting up meat. Some ladies are peeling and cutting papayas, agar cubes (like jello), young coconut to make a fruit salad. Still others have cut up some vegetables and ground spices. Others are getting the giant rice pots going on the long fire. Some guys are putting up a tarp “fence” out front to keep the dust down this afternoon when the wind starts up. It’s a busy, smokey semi chaos. The kids aren’t going at full speed yet, probably because they haven’t eaten yet.

Just got another text confirming I will be met at 2pm by a blue car with a driver named Pila. (Short for Pilatus!)