But, here we got a smile out of her. All is well.

  We attended the wedding of one of our institute teachers, Rebecca Harrypersaud. She is a lovely girl and has done a wonderful job teaching. She married a childhood sweetheart who has been in the US for the last five years. He came back to get her. Her face was stoney all through the wedding ceremony and into the reception. I was afraid someone had a gun to her head.

 
This is a new seminary class in Crabwood Creek. Crabwood Creek is on the Correntyne River which separates Guyana from Suriname. We visited for the first time last week. Which one is the teacher? I had to ask. It is the young woman in the turquoise top. She is doing a pretty good job. She has been a member for 3 months. She loves teaching and loves the kids.

 
 
 
 
There are squatters who have built houses all around the perimeter of the Mahaica compound. They have planted gardens within the compound. The gardens are lush. Elder Langford really wanted to get his hands dirty. They water everything by hand, using a sprinkling can.

 
 
I always thought that a tomb was built and the casket lowered into it and a lid was sealed on top. Not so - the tomb is built with one end open. The casket is slid into place and then the end sealed up. Guyanese do not embalm their dead so the quicker the body is buried, the better. The custom is to have the casket open before the funeral for viewing. Close the casket and then open it again after the funeral before it is taken to the cemetary. While the casket is open, people put flowers and leaves into the casket next to the body and perfume is sprayed liberally. Christopher did not want an open casket. We found one with a glass viewing port over the face. His funeral was one day after his death so his body did not have time to decompose. As the casket was being put into place, his daughter sprinkled perfume all over the top of the casket. I noticed, also, that some people tossed rocks onto the casket just as it was being pushed into the tomb. These are traditions and customs that come from other cultures.

The funeral

Chris Jardine died Tuesday morning after undergoing a leg amputation in St. Joseph Mercy Hospital. It is a sad story. We were able to meet many of the people who took care of him. The Sisters of Charity who visited faithfully every other week, Sister Noel and Sister Cecelene, Bernadette Samlall who has been his housekeeper custodian for years, and finally family members who we did not know existed.

Chris fell while trying to get into his wheelchair in early February. He banged up his leg pretty badly and the hospital put a bandage on it. There is no medical help available so his leg became gangrenous. By last week, he was either going to die from an amputation or die a long painful death of gangrene. The surgery was last Thursday (a week ago). We found out on Saturday. Wayne went down to see him on Sunday without me (I was still too weak and wobbly) and said he looked pretty good. He wanted to go home. He planned to go on Monday, but was distracted and forgot. We got a call Tuesday morning that he had died.

We spent all day Tuesday getting a funeral put together. We decided early on that since all of his family and friends were in Mahaica and they were Catholic that we would not even suggest a Mormon funeral. We do not have missionaries out there, so there was really no point. The Sisters arranged with the priest to do the funeral Wednesday. We went to the hospital morgue and claimed the body, got the funeral home to pick it up, picked out a casket, went back to the hospital to get a death certificate and visited Channel 6 to get his obituary done properly. Most of this he had talked over with Wayne before he died. He was really bad a couple of weeks ago with fever and we didn't think he would live then.

The funeral was in the little Roman Catholic Church on the Mahaica Hospital grounds and he was entombed in the little church yard outside the fence. It was a very nice service. I was impressed with the priest, a black man, who kept it simple. It was uplifting and probably the nicest Catholic funeral I've ever attended. Brother Johnson brought six members of the Demerara Branch including the new branch president. Chris' only daughter was there and remorseful that she hadn't spent more time with her father. His sister was there - she looks a lot like Chris. There were other family members as well as the hospital staff.

  This is our friend, Christopher Jardine. He died Tuesday, March 24, 2009. We will miss him.