Wednesday afternoon, Joël arrived earlier than usual at the ATD Courtyard. “I’m going home,” he said. “We heard that my old neighbor, who was over eighty years old, passed away.”

The chaos of the last few months have been especially hard on older people, with so many families living confined in small spaces, struggling to get food, or even to go out and share news with others. Last Saturday a friend of our team buried her grandmother; the same day, another friend lost his grandfather.

On Wednesday, Joël quickly took the left-over food which had been saved for him and headed out to “lend a hand for the preparations.” We saw him again the next day, Thursday morning, coming back into town to change for work, and then that evening heading back to his neighborhood. As he passed by he explained, “Yesterday we prepared the grave and buried the body in a beautiful spot in the courtyard behind the house. Nobody can manage to bury the dead in the graveyards anymore because of all the problems. To find a vehicle to take you, to do it in security, dig the hole, find the tools… Everything is a problem.”

“We met with the same neighbors as last month when our old neighbor had been robbed. During the night four men had come and stolen everything from him, he had spent the night curled up and terrified in a corner of his room watching everything go – even his stools and cooking pot. With the neighbors, we helped to find some utensils for him, a stool. We repaired his door with some pieces of wood we found and nails. Even the Congolese peace keepers brought hinges and nails to help.”

Joël spent Thursday night at home praying, singing, reading, and talking with his neighbors. Just neighbors and friends – no family. The old man’s sons live 60km away and they couldn’t even be told the news directly – the message was passed on the local radio. Even worse, the week of his death corresponded with one of the convoys of Chadian repatriation vehicles leaving the city, so communication was even more difficult than usual.

Friday evening, Joël told us more about the old man. He had been one of the founders of the neighborhood. The night before several of his neighbors had told what he had meant to the area. Without all the sound systems, instruments or preachers of a funeral – just a moment to share memories.

Often the old men would tell how the neighborhood was in a flood zone, and how with three of his neighbors, they had built terraces to control the floods. He had helped build the foundations of the local school and the Trinity Church, having traveled a long distance with stones on his head. They made supports out of cloth, wood, and leaves so they could carry the stones on their heads and backs. He was also one who had “designed” the neighborhood, having planted trees where the communal areas needed to be laid out: the soccer field, the youth center, the health clinic.

Remembering how much this man had “created and defined” the common spaces, from his church to the school, from sports to the market, Joël remembered the other men who one month before had sent fear and worry into the heart of that man.

After listening, Gisele said, “He died from thinking. Being robbed and seeing everything broken, that didn’t kill him right away. But thinking about it, seeing his goods broken or stolen, it was also his story that was stolen, the respect which he deserved as an elder. And then by thinking so much about that, he died from thinking.”

He died from thinking, driven there by those young people who join the looting without thinking at all. If people don’t think, then the sense of history is lost and anything is permitted, even robbing an old man and driving him to his death.

Michel Besse