Miandry Faty - Waiting on the Dead

Over the last weekend, one of our elderly neighbors passed away (we’d never met him). The family is very poor and lives in a thatch-roofed hut just down the hill from us. People started arriving in the afternoon and stayed all night. They moved the body outside since the house is so small and began the miandry faty or “waiting on the dead." The ceremony stems from the idea that if you leave the dead body alone the witches will come and evoke bad spirits. Yet the families cannot afford to keep the corpse at a morgue.

A couple of the men came up to our house to ask a favor. I was afraid they would want to use our house to display the body, but thankfully they just asked to use our electricity (they have none) by running a long extension cord up to our house so that people would be able to see the corpse. The cord wasn’t wired correctly so after numerous tries our night guard eventually got it to work. He kept joking that they didn’t know anything about electricity though I must admit I found it pretty funny that they had purchased a light bulb and extension cord not having electricity themselves. They began singing sad, mourning songs around the corpse at about 9 p.m. and didn’t stop until almost 5 a.m. Needless to say, we didn’t get much sleep, but it was fascinating to hear some of their cultural funeral practice. To add to the excitement in the neighborhood, a drunken fight broke out near our house, interrupting the ceremony and keeping our guard entertained. In the morning, before we were up and about, they embalmed the body and placed it in a simple wooden coffin with red flowers decorating the top (pictures below). When we began watching again, they were waiting for the car to arrive to take the corpse to the countryside to be buried. Later we learned that we could have gone to visit, even though we’d never met the man, as it is common practice for neighbors to pay their respects. However, as foreigners, we weren’t sure what to do. They won’t take offense because we are foreigners but next time we will eagerly attend to learn more about the Malagasy practice of caring for the dead.