Tragedy on Monday

This has been a very emotional day and this will be a long blog post as John received a message during the night that the Acting Principal (Dean) of the College of Health Science, Esau Kasonda, lost his 8 year old daughter during the night.  She was in the hospital when we arrived and began working with him last week, ill from Malaria but while she was there they discovered that a cancer she was diagnosed with more than a year ago had returned.  It was during the week that they learned that the cancer had spread and could not be operated on.  They had seen an oncologist and the situation didn’t look good, but we never dreamed that she would die so quickly.

We were all so saddened by the news and quite confused about what to do, both personally and culturally.  And of course, we felt the pain of every parent’s nightmare losing a child especially when we have come to know and care about Esau.  Would we try to proceed with our work, and if so when?  And the Drs. From U of Washington were planning to start their seminar at 8am this morning, but Esau’s wife was a teacher at one of the schools they expected to attend, and in a small town like Ekwendeni which is also a Presbyterian mission station, we knew that many people would know Easu’s family, or be members of the same church and thus touched by this awful loss.

The Drs. are leaving for home tomorrow so rescheduling the workshop was not an option, and many of the people coming to the seminar would have traveled long distances, so we with Flemmings good advice decided to go to the seminar site and start a bit late after paying a condolence call on Esau’s family.  It turned out that Esau was away attending to a casket and other arrangements so we started the seminar a little bit late and discovered that most of the people who were going to attend had come.  We would plan to pay our condolence call sometime during the day.

At lunchtime we learned that Esau was back home and went to the house to pay our respects and offer our sympathy.  When we arrived at the house we saw that the small casket was in the yard on a table covered with flowers and surrounded by hundreds of people there all over the yard and porch.  Flemmings explained  that service was being held to send off the body for the funeral, which will be held in their home village about 3 hours away. After the service, the family was to use the College’s small bus to travel to their home town with the body, transport was arranged for a few others but many of those 100 or so people would travel to the funeral to be joined by even more family and friends from the village. It was an amazing display of community support and love – and the power of familiar rituals at such a difficult time since the death was only about 8 hours before we arrived.  Everyone knew what to expect and how to play a part in supporting the family who has experienced such a terrible loss.  It was a very moving experience and comforting to know how much Esau would be supported.

We were about 30 minutes late in starting the session after lunch, but people were very understanding about it, and the session itself was a resounding success.  It brought together both health professionals and educators to learn more about mental/emotional health in children and how it can affect their learning.  It sounds like the Drs. are committed to an ongoing relationship with people here and were talking last night about coming back once a year to continue the work.  We are really going to miss them! Our guest house has 4 rooms, and it has been Flemmings and the 3 women here since last week when we arrived.  We have bonded over a number of experiences, not to mention today, and the guesthouse will be very quiet indeed for the rest of our time.

Of course, in addition to our sadness for Easu and his family we can’t help but wonder what will happen with our project.  We had planned on completing our interviews today and tomorrow and interviewing Esau again to fill in any of the blanks we might have on Wednesday or Thursday which would wrap up our project by the end of the week.  The College offices were closed today and will be closed again tomorrow for the funeral and burial.  It is difficult to say when Esau may be back at work or whether out interviews can be scheduled with him away since he would be the one doing the scheduling.

We were all overwhelmed by how different deaths are handled here in Africa, and how much more commonly they impact people’s lives and work – and by the amazing community support.  And I’m sure as parents, all of us were overcome with the emotion of the loss of an 8 year old child.