Here are some scattered impressions I jotted down after spending all day at the viewing and burial of a friend’s sister last week.

She contracted HIV from her husband, who died last year. I watched her waste away for months on the dirt floor of my dear friend Davide’s compound, and she finally found her rest. Another silent, fallen member of the legion destroyed by AIDS. She won’t even become a statistic. No report will be filed. I never really had the heart to clean up or organize these thoughts, so what follows a bit all over the map…

***

Ironically, I arrived expecting to plan our World AIDS Day manifestation for next week, and found most of the village sitting silently outside Davide’s compound. Davide’s wife, my Peace Corps liaison with the village, apologized and explained that we wouldn’t be able to have the meeting due to the death of his sister the previous night.

Dumbly, I went through the motions of greeting the necessary “responsables” of village, then sat down in the proffered seat as the business of death occurred around me. Mechanical, it seemed, a well-rehearsed routine. They have, after all, had so much practice.

Anger swelled up inside me. Even now, the posturing, the blame shifting. Some of Davide’s “uncles” (heads of the family) saying he neglected his sister after she came north following the death of her husband in Lomé. I suddenly remember vaguely the goat that died here in this compound a little while ago, struggling for a day and a half to vacate a pregnancy. Only a tiny cloven hoof would peek out. Somehow in the fog of my brain they seem connected. Nothing was done to help her, either. Does that mean they did neglect their sister?

I didn’t know what to say, how to act. All faces were blank, masks of cultural comfort leaving me blind. Some people even joked. It wasn’t until the procession to the gravesite began that the matronne of the family broke down. It wasn’t until I saw her face, creased by years of toil and suffering, birth and death, loss and gain, crumple into tears beneath her colorful head wrap that I, too, felt a human connection at all. She who has seen more death than all of us was the first to let it wash over her. The first to cry.

The ceremony was all in Kabyé so I stared everywhere but the coffin. I took in the deep fissures in feet; so many deformed by polio or accidents in the fields. I saw strong hands hardened by years of labor folded in prayer to some white Anglo-Saxon French-speaking God they were told to worship. Those hands seem almost delicate now.

Later there was tchouk and quiet muttering. A makeshift church choir sang off-key. I kept wishing they weren’t singing pious, self-righteous French Christian hymns, lifeless as the corpse before us. Traditional music has spirit, this was tinny and pleading. Not at all like these people and their lives.

Unable to feel; there’s a numbness coming on and a mild annoyance with the behavior of those present. Jockeying, pushing for a better look at another victim of our worst war. But who am I to say - these people live death every day. So many people dying all the time. Grief seems a luxury of the privileged now.

Even now, a man approached me and began asking what I do here, telling me how great Americans are and how he’d been in Washington, DC for four years. He of course didn’t take my stony silence as disapproval and kept telling me how wonderful it was to have me. Everyone thanked me for my presence, making me feel even more powerless. Why does it matter that I’m here? Doesn’t it matter that she’s dead? Even now that unwanted fame and attention.

I only feel awkward, heavy in my great big traditional dress. Cumbersome as I follow swaying hips in the procession Not knowing where to look, I focus on feet going in and out of the kitchen hut, now a viewing room. Heady incense pouring out now. I can see a single candle burning. Soon it will be my turn to go in, to visit the body, naked and slathered in some manner of preservatives, an old woman sitting by to fan the flies away.

All I can do was think wildly - maybe I could have done something. I gave Davide the money and asked him to get the test done, but maybe I should have taken her to the hospital myself. Even if she had tested positive, no good could come of it, I told myself. It’s not as if those kinds of treatments are available for the people I know, poor subsistence farmers struggling with falling grain prices and changing weather patterns.

We all know what she died of, but none of us will speak of it. How can we fight an enemy we won’t face? No one ever knows what’s ailing them, unless it’s to say that they have a “petit pallu,” a “little malaria.”

I’m reminded of a scholarship girl named Bikili for whom I’ve fought tooth and nail ever since she got pregnant and tried to drop out of school. I refused to let her. Eight days her infant daughter was in hospital, eight days she wasn’t at school, and still she couldn’t tell me what plagued her child. All the medicines she bought, not knowing why.

The medical practice itself here is like a wild west traveling medicine man thinking “What do they know, anyway?,” selling crackpot cures to supposedly ignorant country folk.

I remember seeing the coffin arrive and thinking with a start that it was too long and narrow. She’d never fit, I thought desperately, someone has to tell them! It seemed a pressing need no one noticed. The inside was lined with Heineken paper. You can’t even get Heineken in this country, I thought blearily. There were sickening thuds as they maneuvered the box into the earth, freshly dug that morning.

She was buried back behind the millet fields, far away from the village cemetery. She is there. All alone.

The sun sinking fast again.

Tonight I’ll bike home through the cool of harmattan starting to touch our evenings. Others will go back and sit up all night in vigil. When the light breaks, they will head out to the fields. Life must go on. And it will.