Burial Humor

Two Random Bits of Burial Humor

ONE
Today Pastor Shao and I were trying to figure out which day we had done a certain thing. That certain thing doesn’t matter at all, but as we were discussing dates on the calendar he remembered that this certain thing had happened on the same day as a particular funeral.

It was a funeral I couldn’t remember. He said “yes, you remember we had it in the morning.”
I said “no, funerals are always in the afternoon, 1:00 right.”

“No,” he said “not that one, we had it in the morning because there was such a bad smell.”

I definitely had not been at that funeral, so Pastor Shao continued to describe the day to me. The man had died 12 days earlier in Dar Es Salaam, it took them so long to get the body to Uswaa that when the casket arrived at the family home in the morning, the brother decided they must move up the burial.

Pastor said that all of the people stood back as far as possible, but the pastor and evangelist leading the service were in pain from a smell so bad it made their eyes water. He said that they were so greatly relieved when the dirt was back in the ground.

We laughed so hard, we forgot all about what we had been talking about in the first place.


TWO
Pastor Mmanga is constantly trying to get me to eat more. He says that I need to go back to Nebraska a “huge mama.” We joke about this all the time. So far I think I’m the same size as when I started. Whew. He says that mamas need to be huge because they do all of the work. It’s true, women here do most of the hard labor. 

Today during tea, I was putting just a small amount of sugar in my tea and telling him that at home I never put sugar in my tea. He responded that he shouldn’t be using sugar either. I asked him if that was because he didn’t want to become fat. Then he went into this long explanation about how glucose works (which of course I already knew) where if you take in more glucose than you burn up you will get fat. Yes, I told him I agreed with his reasoning.

Then he said “I should stop eating sugar so I don’t become fat because I don’t want those ants snacking on my body when I’m dead and buried.”