Bintu's Baby

My sister's baby boy survived the birth, but I think he was still around two months premature. His father Ensa came back from Senegal the next day and care of the baby immediately went to his mother. When a baby is born it spends one week inside the home, before it comes out on the seventh day and is given a name. On that day the mother and baby will just sit around outside and people will come by to greet them. Ensa and his mother Camisa rotated shifts in the babies room for the first week heating up bottles of formula and feeding the baby. The baby slept throughout the day and woke up about 5 pm to stay awake until around 5 am the following morning, so both Ensa and Camisa were pretty tired. When the week was up, the bay came out and was named Sarjo after the head of Ensa's compound. When a baby loses a parent it also picks up the name Tunko. So the boy was Tunko Sarjo Jallow. For the first week I went at least once a day to say hello and sit for a while. During the second week another woman from my compound began to breastfeed Sarjo. Every night after dinner, my aunt, younger sister and I would grab a flashlight and walk across the village to Tunko's compound and sit with him for about 15 minutes while he fed. He even started making occasional trips into our compound during the day to see his other grandma.
In early November I was out one morning stacking peanuts with the same aunt who breastfeeds the baby. It was afternoon, but not quite lunch time or time to go home. I was taking a break and my aunt told me to get up and let's go home. I noticed that everyone else was headed home too. I thought maybe the pumps were on and everyone was going home to get water. Something was definitely happening, and when I got back to the village I found out that a young boy from the new Sami had just died. His father was the bread baker and we had become friends earlier in the year, so I really made a point to attend the funeral that evening.
The funeral took place at dusk and it was dark when I got home. My aunt was sitting next to my house and before I could go inside she said my name. I walked over to her and she told me "Tunko has died". We immediately went right over to his compound and people were already gathered there. It was dark, but after praying he was taken to the graveyard and his father laid him in the ground right next to his mother.
I walked home late and the day had put everyone in a pretty somber mood. I went inside to eat dinner and get ready for bed. Before I could get there the sound of crying in the village brought everybody back outside of their huts to the middle of the compound. My dad and uncle went out to find out what was going on. My sister came running into the compound a few minutes later and told us the news. There was a mother of six from another compound who had never recovered from the birth of her last baby. She passed away and was the third death in our village in one day. Nobody hurried back inside to sleep, we all just sat outside together in silence.