The Circle of Life

Would this blog about my life in Africa be complete without a reference to The Lion King??  By the way, the first few times I heard people speaking Swahili I got really excited; A few of the words, mostly simple greetings, are heard in the Disney movie.

This past Sunday was a long one.  I attended a church service in Bari at the local cathedral.  I've gone there before for the English service, but this was my first time attending in the local language.  At every church, they always ask the visitors to stand and introduce themselves.  Even though we had already attended, we were still new to the congregation so we were forced to the center of attention by the Bishop of the Dioceses, who is on the Board of Directors for RECONCILE.  We dazzled the people with our Arabic knowledge, all of which I practically learned in my first week here. ("My name is Jillian.  I work at RECONCILE")

One of our coworkers invited us (Nancy, Shelvis and myself) to this service because his first child was getting baptized.  We didn't realize what we were getting into...

This baby was asleep

"What's your child's name?"

One of the visitors to our compound attended a mass on Saturday, where they also had baptisms.  Between the thirty he saw in that service and the SEVENTY that we saw in this service, he witnessed one hundred children get baptized in one weekend.  

Not happy. She was screaming the entire time

  

I suppose you could say it was beautiful to see all these people bringing their children to the church to be baptized, but it was mostly hilarious as none of the sleeping babies or young children were happy to be woken up and splashed with water in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.

NOT happy!

Another one of our coworkers was acting as a godfather

With all the passing of babies, Nancy and I were also "fearing" that they might drop one...

After a lovely meal at our colleagues' home in Yei, the day ended on a low note with my first funeral that I've attended since being in South Sudan.  The fact that I've been in the country for several months and still haven't attended a funeral service is actually a testament to how much I really avoid them.  With the number of times that staff leave to attend funerals and the nights that people stay up late playing drums, singing and mourning, I know that death happens often. For the fist time, I was hearing up close some of the haunting singing that I had previously heard from across the town in the middle of the night.