sunday is funeral day

not because i'm having thoughts of death or anything but...in kinshasa, sunday is funeral day. let's just say there's a lot of people in kinshasa, and there are a lot of people dying. loooots of funerals. there are funeral neighborhoods, like, a square where there might be 8 funerals at a time, and you can basically forget driving through in a car. or, just beyond the airport, a whole cemetary neighborhood backed up with lines of hurses and people flooding into the streets from the dusty fields nearby. leave it to the congolese to turn a sad day into a wicked party though. people are snazzily dressed, screaming, holding up huge adorned ribboned guilded coffins and running through the streets like they just won a soccer game. then there's the party, eat some goat, drink some beer. i bet people have funerals to go to every week, it's just how it is. but it's soooo expensive. i heard it's a minimum 600$. then, there are the pimped out hurses with the lights and sirens, or just having the car alarm sound, that's gotta cost more. and the huge imported rose bouquets that say reposez en paix. and if you have 200 people showing up.... someone please explain to me then, how people who can barely feed their families spend half a year's salary on their dead.