In Ghana, the biggest celebration that will ever be held in your honor is your funeral. Families plan and carry out this huge event with relentless determination doing whatever is necessary to raise funds by selling assets or borrowing money. Hundreds of people will attend a funeral. I?ve heard two explanations, one is that a big funeral demonstrates family solidarity. The other explanation is that the family thinks they will be able to make money off the funeral through contributions from those who attend.

Funerals take place over several days and involve symbolic patterns of dress. At the funeral and burial everyone wears black or shades of brown and sometimes red. Red is often worn at funerals where someone has died early in life to symbolize the added pain one feels at losing someone young. However, when someone very old dies, everyone wears white to symbolize triumph. The day after the funeral a thanksgiving service and reception is held and everyone wears black and white to symbolize the celebration of a life. There can be two receptions, one after the funeral and then another one the next day after the thanksgiving service. At each reception a live band or DJ is hired for entertainment.

Since funerals are so large some people spend the weekends attending the funerals of people they don?t know just for the free food and entertainment. This is easy to do because there are ?advertisements? for funerals posted on walls all over the city. They also announce them on the radio and TV and in the newspapers.

People seem to die suddenly and inexplicably here. A friend of mine told me about a woman he knew who recently got sick and died. She was 29 years old. When I asked how she died he told me there was some problem with her heart. This is what I?m usually told as an explanation for how someone had died. There isn?t the habit of labeling and categorizing illness here like there is in the West. Whether you live or die also sometimes depends on whether you can pay the doctor for treatment.

People often turn to religion on issues of health. Christians pray or attend special healing services, both Christians and non-Christians may appeal to traditional healers. Instead of looking to biological mechanisms, the explanations for illness sometimes point to an ?enemy? who used supernatural forces against the afflicted. At a church service a man got up and told a story about how a stranger had come up to him in his office and touched him on the rib. Shortly thereafter he fell ill. Similarly there were rumors in the family of the 29-year-old woman that someone had brought about her death because they were jealous that she was about to move abroad to join her fiance. It was described as a family curse since her mother had also died at age 29.

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