FRANCISCAN MONTHLY
Page 10
REFLECTIONS OF A COSMOPOLITAN LAY MINISTER By James Aiello
was currently taking French at school as well.
We conclude the story by Lay Minister James Aiello on his experiences at a typical African funeral in Burgersfort, Mpumalanga Province.
With that, he and his father went back to the tent to be with the rest of the family.
I’ve honestly never seen so many great, elegant, headstones and structures as there were in that cemetery.
In South Africa, when a family member passes on, there are two services – the church and burial service I just described, and then, a year later, the unveiling of the tombstone. My friend and I discussed this and the fact that we’d have to come back a year hence.
There was a tent set up for the family, near a freshly-dug grave surrounded by an artificial grass “carpet”. People were standing behind the tent, but I decided to walk down to the next row and stand near some of the existing tombstones, but with a line of sight towards the grave. The casket was on a frame over the grave, with straps, etc., which clearly indicated that at some time in the service, it would be lowered into the ground. As I stood there, my friend came up behind me, and I turned and offered my condolences. He was standing a bit behind me. The grave-side service commenced, the brass band started playing, and slowly, slowly the casket was lowered into the ground. My friend turned away until it was done. Shortly thereafter, his son, whom I had met when he was probably about 10 so, came to our side. I greeted him warmly, remarking how he was no longer a kid but indeed a young man. He is now going to a private school in the Nelspruit area. I asked whether he was still speaking French as well, as he had lived with his mother in Geneva for quite a while. He said he was and that he
Now it was time to go to his family house, nearby, where his mother and the rest of his family would host (literally) the entire village for lunch. I and my colleagues then drove the kilometre or so to the family house, which was perched on a hill, rising some fifty feet or so, from the street that we had travelled on to get there. We trudged up the hill and there were three or four separate “buffet” tables set up at different places in the yard, some next to open-sided tents and others next to places where people could sit. There must have been hundreds of people there – each buffet table had a queue 15 to 20 people long. The food and drink (nonalcoholic) kept coming and coming. My colleague and I got in a queue next to a tent, filled our plates with pap, wors and green beans. We greeted our other colleagues as we ate and also talked to other folks from Pretoria we knew that had come to the funeral. That meal was the first one I’d eaten since lunch on Friday. Lunch over, Lucky and I started our return journey to Nelspruit. This time in broad daylight. Now I could appreci-
ated the thousands and thousands of acres of pine forests that we had driven through the night before to get to Burgersfort. These are state forests, and the trees are used for everything that trees can be used for, so we drove past newly-harvested sections of bare earth on our way back. And we were also able to enjoy the pleasure of passing the chrome ore trucks again – but this time, they were loaded, so they could only travel 25 km/hr. at best! What a pleasure! But it was a beautiful, blue sky day – the cliffs and buttes between which Burgersfort sits faded into the distance – Lydenburg came and went – and White River – a beautiful town north of Nelspruit hove into view. Lucky told me he had a shortcut to the airport which he was going to use, so he turned onto a road that I am quite familiar with, as it passes the premises of our potter, where we have purchased all of our “special day” dishes, plates, cups, and other food/beverage containers. Lucky was impressed when I pointed out their shops as we drove by. We arrived at the airport about an hour and a half before my flight back to Pretoria. I gave Lucky a 50 Rand tip and went into the SA Express lounge to contemplate what I’d just been through. It was a moving experience in more ways than one and for which I feel privileged to have attended.