The other day, shortly after my arrival to Sumbrungu, I was invited by Lucas, the library coordinator, to a funeral in his family's home.

After greeting many of Lucas's family members, we settled onto a large tire under some much appreciated shade, and Lucas explained some of the funeral traditions. Gesturing to the goat tied up next to him, Lucas explained that people bring offerings of money or animals. The animals are slaughtered over the course of the funeral celebration, often playing the dual role of sacrifice and food for the numerous guests. I had to chuckle to myself at the parallels to the overwhelming amounts of cold cut and cheese platters that people had brought to funerals I had attended in the US. It really only takes about two meals of baloney before you start to wonder where you can get a little goat.

This particular funeral was on its fourth day, and we were going to see a "sending off" ceremony of sorts, where friends and family give things to the deceased to tell her "we will not forget about you" because the final funeral closing rights were not going to be for another year.

As Lucas was explaining the finer points of the traditions, a large group of women came around the outside of the house chanting a song and moving and clapping in time while a shaker drove the beat. We followed them into the courtyard, where they began to dance and sing. The women were of all ages, and many were very old. However, they were some of the most exuberant dancers, leading the songs and jumping into the middle of the group to jump and stamp their feet when the tempo of the clapping rose to a frenzied pitch.

After a while, the group began to gather close around a wall, still singing and dancing, but now with a definite focus. Lucas and I climbed onto one of the flat roofs to get a better view. The group was gathered around a large clay pot, and the women who were closest with the deceased were kneeling around it holding onto the brim with both hands. The women around the pot would get up and sing in intervals, sometimes with the others, sometimes an individual dance, often ending with a long high yell that they directed right into the mouth of the pot. One of the women began quietly crying, reminding me that this celebration was for a funeral, but she was led away because this was not a time for crying. After all the women who wanted to dedicated something to the pot, the women carried it as a group into a small opening in one of the buildings, where it will be saved until the final funeral rites. Then more general singing and dancing resumed, including an appearance by two men complete with bows and a huge quiver of arrows, the traditional wear for the war dance.

We were there for most of the afternoon, and as dusk set in and bugs started to bite, Lucas suggested we head home. We climbed down, but before we could leave, I got pulled into dancing. Full disclosure, it takes almost nothing to pull me into dancing, I will dance at any opportunity, and with the beat that had been going on all afternoon, it had been more a matter of self control, and not wanting to overstep boundaries that had kept me from jumping in long before. That being said, I still don't have a ton what could rightly be termed "rhythm" when I dance, but it didn't seem to matter much. Pretty soon I was jumping and stamping my feet with an old woman as the others clapped a beat for us. After laughing a while with everyone, I thanked them for having me and we headed back to the Women's Center in Sumbrungu, with a grin glued to my face after such a pleasant day.

Ellisland, 1791

Dear Sir:

Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.

R.B.