That weekend, about 20 international students piled into air conditioned minibuses and drove towards the Volta region (a lot seems to happen to me there). We were going to attend a funeral in the home village of my drumming instructor, Johnson. Now, while you take a moment to process that last sentence, I have to explain that funerals here are not the same as they are in the US. A funeral here is meant as a celebration of the life of the deceased to honor their spirit (which is still around) whereas I think of funerals at home more as events for the living, an opportunity to acknowledge their feelings. Because of this fundamental difference, funerals in Ghana are open to the public, and we were emphatically welcomed to hear about the woman who had died and partake in her celebration.
The first order of business when we arrived (after a short time playing with the little kids, to whom two vans full of white people was pretty noteworthy) was to gather and pour a libation. This has, of course, happened before. We gathered on benches and Johnson pulled out a bottle of locally made gin. He instructed us to drink some and pour some on the ground for the ancestors to thank them for protecting us on the journey there. After that, we toured around the village (spelled Dzodze pronounced "djo-dje") and met some of the people who live there and also searched for food and water, which we found on the main road. We also saw the school at which Johnson used to teach. 
As we walked, what looked like a parade came towards us. This group was part of a different funeral in the same region. They were marching following a car with the corpse sitting upright in the back seat. They were dancing, playing, and celebrating, stopping to say hello to us or pull us into the dance-fest. It felt more like a parade than a funeral.
We shared dinner with Johnson's sisters who made banku for us, and then after the sun had set and we had played a few games of cards, Johnson brought out the drums. They were all kpalongos (almost conga shaped, I'll show you mine when I get home :-) ) and we practiced some of the songs we're working on. Some of us are also in a dance class, and they practiced their dance moves as the rest of us drummed.
Exhausted after our drum circle, many people fell asleep staring up at the millions of stars that you can't see in the city. Johnson came by to rouse the sleepy and invite them to a celebration, where the family of the deceased woman was keeping the wake. It was a long church service mingled with dancing. You can see Emily in the first picture, and the second is Jessica standing next to a woman who proposed to marry me so that I could "take her back to London". So much wrong with that. Anyway, while we were dancing , the immediate family of the dead woman were also gathered there, separate, wearing only black and mourning with no holds barred. They just wailed and howled with sadness. It was really shocking to see such a harsh dichotomy. Was I supposed to celebrate or mourn? How could you possibly dance with such sadness right next to you? But after discussing the cultural set up of the funeral, we realized that a celebration did not flow against the grief of the family. Rather, it supported them, allowing for them to feel their intense loss while being reminded that the community was all around them at that they would one day be happy again.
The next day began with oats and tea for breakfast. We'd spent the night sleeping on a hard clay floor, so everybody rather slowly woke up. We talked about our experiences of the night before and also sat in silence for some time. A few of us helped a man pulling dried corn kernals off of the cob to store for the rainy season.
Shortly thereafter, Johnson woke up and beckoned to us to follow him. We walked toward a latticed area with dried vines and he told us it was a local shrine. When he was a kid, he said, his family woke up one day to find his little sister missing. She had been summoned in a dream to the high priestess of the village, and from then on was trained as a priestess herself. She poured libation for us in a ritual and we thanked her (at one point one of my friends was dizzy and about to faint, so I had to take off a little early, but definitely got the experience.From there, we joined the solemn and celebratory march of the casket of the dead woman from the town center toward a public ceremony. That was particularly difficult for me because while I wanted to interact with locals and hear their stories, I was reflecting on death and thinking about my mom being in the hospital before I came to Ghana, and how little I would feel like celebrating. But when the parade got to the grave site itself, a certain peace fell over everyone. People said a few words, and young men from the village alternated filling in the grave after her casket had been put in it. The chaotic pattern of dirt flying through the air and landing with a rhythmic thud on the coffin seemed too symbolic to comment on. There were such a wide range of emotions in the few days that we spent there, each expressed with so much intensity. It seemed like the only honest way to conduct a funeral, to bring out the complexity of feeling so happy, proud, disturbed, sad, inexplicable. To have it resolve with such quiet was reassuring.
We moved from that funeral to another smaller one. A member from the village had died somewhere else in Ghana. After conducting a burial at the death-site, friends there shipped the man's hair and fingernails back to Dzodze so the village could also bury him. It was a much smaller group of people and a much shorter ceremony as they drummed, sang, and buried a small box in a grassy field.
We continued on then, in a whirlwind tour, to meet Johnson's brother. We arrived and were offered more alcohol in a variety of forms than any of us could stomach (everyone was pretty dehydrated after marching in the sun all day). He was very welcoming, invited us back any time we were in town, and then wished us a safe journey. We ate some rice with Johnson's sisters and then boarded the buses home. We
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