Tuina Aubin. He's 15 and a student in my 5e Math class, 3rd in his class overall, and he passed away this week. When I showed up at school Thursday morning, the director was talking to the Bureau des Eleves (student council) and when he was done he came up to me and said that he had some bad news: a student had died.
When the director told me the name, I recognized it, but couldn't put a face with it immediately. And that killed me. I've spent about 4 months with these kids now, and I doubt I could name 10% of that class. I knew what area of the class he sat in, I know that I recognized the name, meaning it was someone who participated, but I couldn't picture his face for the life of me. It wasn't until a couple hours later when all the professors sat around talking about him that I was finally sure I was thinking of the right kid. It just felt like i was doing him some sort of injustice by not even being able remember him.
As to how he died, no really knows at this point. He was sick this last week, he had come in to school Tuesday to get the Medical Notebook (they have the local health clinic sign it to justify their absence from school) and he apparently had some sort of local medicine on his forehead (used for headaches) and he was sweating a lot. So it could have been anything. And apparently the situation escalated over night, and being that my village is at least 2 hours from a hospital, I doubt anyone thought to take him there. Or they thought it wasn't that serious.
After hearing the news that morning, the school staff and the bureau des eleves went to his family's house to give our condolences. And it was the hardest thing I've ever done. As we approached the house we could hear the crying; as we got closer we saw the roughly 30 women sitting around under a hanger. The women were all crying: heavy, pained, anguished crying. In this cultural it is not acceptable to cry unless someone has died. Meaning that small frustrations and struggles we often cry over in America are dealt with in silence here. Part of me wonders that because a death is the only time they can cry or let out their frustrations, they take it to another level. Another part of what makes it so different is that in the US, mourning families are supposed to maintain some level of self-control. It's often considered uncouth to be overly distraught in front of others. Here, they don't care that anyone is seeing their grief: their child just died, of course they're grieving. That's how they see it, and that's how everyone else sees it, too.
After a couple minutes the person standing in front of me moved a little to the side and I noticed that their was a bundled blanket in the middle of the women under the hangar. It took me about two seconds to realize that it was his body. He was just wrapped in a simple fleece blanket - the same blanket every market sells and every home has one or two of - and was laying on a straw mat. I found out later that my director asked if we could see him, but they declined. I later learned that the body was washed the next day as part of the burial process, and it is at that point that men also join the wake.
When we got back to school the biology teacher just kind of walked slightly away from the rest of the group and simply states "that was too hard." He was the one to ask why only women were there. None of the professors are the same ethnic group as the village, but our secretary is Bwaba, so she explained some of the customs to all of us. As we were sitting around talking the biology teacher once again speaks up, "just this week, I used Aubin as an example of one the good kids we had in 6e last year." The french teacher commented that if there were too many players for soccer, he could always ask Aubin to wait for the next half and Aubin would never make a fuss about it. He was polite, kind and smart.
I've talked to a couple other volunteers about this, and I think that most volunteers experience a student death in their two years here. Pretty sad statistic and I wonder how it compares to a lifetime of teaching in the US. When I was student teaching at DCIS, one of the teachers was talking about his motivation for joining the Peace Corps and he said that he did it because he wanted to see dead bodies. Not in some disturbing morbid way, but just that he wanted to live a life closer to edge of life. A little less protection between you and the realities of life and death the world over. And whether or not that is something I was expressly looking for in my service, it's certainly true.
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