Malagasy Funeral - Part 3

I had a wonderfully informative chat with my leaders, in which the topic of Malagasy funerals came up.  I always wondered why there was such a high expectation on the Malagasy people to give such a high sum of money at funerals.  The fact is, life after death is more highly valued here, than life itself.  The Malagasy people believe that those who die come back at ancestors and these ancestors have the power to affect the living.  Therefore, the living must honor the dead if they want the ancestors to act favorably toward them.  A funeral must therefore be a huge celebration, which explains the need for Malagasy to give large amounts of money at funerals.

As a result of the need to give above their financial ability those involved often end up in dept because of funerals.  Further, because they give so much money they take advantage of as much of the party/funeral as they can.  The fact that they stay up for three days isn’t just to honor the dead, they know that after the funeral is over they will be in dept, not only because they just spend the last three days not working, but because they borrowed money from others to get to the funeral (which costs money) and then gave all they had to the funeral fund.  The saying “eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die” takes on a whole new meaning with these people. 

As I said before, I know understand why the Malagasy people give so much money to a funeral and why they “party” for the three days until the burial.  They have to honor the dead or they will not be “taken care of” by the dead.  Satan has done an amazing job of trapping these people.  Not only has he made them give more money than they can afford, putting already poor people further into dept, but think about how many more funerals poor people have.  If they only knew the truth.