Harvests and Hearses: The Overlooked Cost of Funerals in Farming Communities

In Busia county in the recent days there have been a spike in the number of funerals.  In half a kilometer radius, there’s been at least one funeral each week in the last two months. I don’t know what is really going on! People are scared.

I’m writing this on my phone at my cousin’s place who lost a two month old baby yesterday. We are here as family and friends to console him during this tough period. He’s a humble guy, and a month ago we were with him in Butula to bury my sister’s father-in-law, may his soul rest in peace.

Guess how we learned of the demise of my cousin’s child? At another funeral. You heard that right. The news came in exactly as they were lowering into the grave the late Mukade, a distant aunt. I remember seeing Eugene, the current chair of the clan and my cousin shaking his head in disbelief after receiving the sad news. And in minutes, the news was on everyone’s lips. As we left for our homes after the old lady’s obsequies in the late afternoon with my big brother, he told me he was headed to another of his church member, one Mr. Ochieng’ who was found unconscious in a farm and quickly whisked to the hospital where he was declared dead on arrival. Ochieng’ is to be laid to rest this coming Saturday.

A few meters from where we departed with my brother, with him headed to his friend’s funeral and I home, there was another funeral happening of a guy named Erick, a one time sukuma wiki customer of mine from back in 2022 when I was still growing vegetables by River Sio, before temporarily relocating to Kajiado. But his obsequies seemed strangely quiet with only a few people present. Probably the desertion could be attributed to the other burial or exhaustion. It should not be forgotten that only two weeks ago these very people had buried a young man, a very popular boda boda guy known as Okwang’ who met his death at the Walatsi bridge on the Busia – Mumias road. Not forgetting my former classmate, now Dr. Cyprian Syeunda’s father, a retired teacher who passed away and was buried only a few days after the late Okwang’.

Yesterday evening I was speaking to a friend of mine who had come to buy my passion fruits for her beautiful daughter about my day and the current funeral to befall us, only to learn that she too had her own funerals. She had lost a cousin in Ikondokhera, Kisoko, another boda boda guy who had been found dead with a slit throat and his motorbike apparently missing, and on top of that now her own mother’s sister has lost her husband in Mumias as well. I was lost for words.

What’s really going on. Is there an ongoing pandemic we don’t know about? All my life I’ve never seen such a chain of funerals in my community, not even during the COVID-19 pandemic period. Actually during that period we lost very few people. I know in the current crisis the cases are unrelated with varying causes of death but still there ought to be an explanation. The government or someone should tell us something, anything.

What these many deaths are doing more than the grieving and the pain of losing loved ones, is hurting our already empty pockets and the agricultural sector which is the backbone of our economy. How so you might ask.

Our farms need people to tend to, people to manage the crops to make sure our people are fed and have money in their pockets. But how can this be possible if death keeps depriving us of our most important asset? Who will grow food and manage livestock to sustain our livelihoods? Funeral programs drain people in every aspect: materially; emotionally; physically.

Funeral arrangements cost money everywhere you go, but no other place beats us. Here in Western Kenya, funerals can sometimes drag for months in the name of ‘funeral arrangements’ which in other words is collecting money in order to meet the funeral committee’s projected budget. And budgets sometimes run into millions of money. People have to contribute, like for the case of my clan is Kshs. 500 minimum per individual for the men and Ksh. 250 minimum for the ladies. So if we’re having serial funerals in our clan, it will mean our pockets losing money, money we don’t even have. This at the end of the drains all of us to psychologically. Yesterday at the funeral, I sat next to one of my older cousins and after receiving news of the child’s death he shook his head miserably asking where he was to get another five hundred. And maybe it explains his absence at the funeral today. And the constant travel to and from funerals is physically exhausting to people. The young people who could’ve helped their parents are too tired to do much after night of reveling in disco matanga.

When you are on the road every other day, your farms are affected. This season was one of those prospect seasons where we all agreed that the farm yield was going to be abundant. People had prepared their farms well, acquired the inputs like the government’s subsidized subsidized fertilizers in time and in their numbers, and done almost every other thing right. And it rained! A month after planting, it was green everywhere you looked, before the devil hit us and funerals started popping up one after another. It has been funeral after funeral nonstop. Today there’s no conversation that happens without people mentioning funeral and burials. It’s sad and frightening.

Now maize in many farms are tussling in dirty farms full of weeds because they were forsaken at a crucial stage. Some people didn’t even get the time to harvest their beans and now they are silently sprouting in farms, starting to germinate again alongside their parents. Horticultural crops like tomatoes that need constant management were the most affected. The sudden break in the normal spraying program meant a field day for the destructive pesticides like the aphids and tuta absoluta.

Read: Cheap Ways of controlling Tuta absoluta

As a people we are staring at hunger if these funerals don’t stop or at least reduce. People need a break. Farmers need a break from funerals so they can give their farms more attention and salvage whatever little is left. What are we going to eat if there’s no harvest and we’re spending all our savings on funeral arrangements. In fact as it stands, the only people celebrating in this community today are the morticians, funeral homes and coffin makers, the clergy, and not forgetting the disco matanga dejays.