Our Field Trip in Toraja was as educational as Ms. You-Know-Who’s class, and also was as interesting as Mr. Caffeine-holic’s class on every B day morning. I was so glad to be with those teachers for my last field trip at SIS. I give a special thank to Ms. You-Know-Who, who made us to go to bed very early with taking care of our health and conditions for the next days during field trip. I also want to say sorry to her making embarrassed when she knocked my room at 2 a.m. and I opened door with wearing nothing except my underwear and bath gown.
-Funeral Ceremony in Toraja
On the third day, the most impressive thing I watched was Torajan’s traditional funeral ceremony. In Toraja, people believe the afterlife, and think that souls easily go to heaven as more and more animals, especially pigs and buffalos, are sacrificed at funerals. In Toraja, pigs and buffalos are slaughtered right away when funerals start, and cooked with bamboo sticks. I saw pig slaughters once at Thailand before, but Toraja one was quiet shocking because Torajan people did not faint pigs before they kill pigs while Thailand people fainted pigs by clubbing. In Toraja, people only cry before and after the funeral, because funeral is the same thing as local festival. When tour guide said this before we went to the funeral, I couldn’t understand what he meant by ‘festival’, but when I saw people’s smiling and happy faces at the funeral I could understand it. In Toraja, preparation for funerals usually takes very long time, even more than a year. It’s because the family need to build bamboo houses for guests and make grave for the dead person. In Toraja, the dead body is left in the house, usually in a form of mummy, until the funeral is ready to be held. Long time ago, if husband passed away, his wife had to sleep next to the corpse and jump into the fire during his funeral. After watching funerals, we went to Pallawa, a traditional Toraja village. Traditional houses were decorated with batiks, buffalo horns, and boat-shaped roofs. In Toraja, the buffalo horns represent the richness of the family. The roofs were shaped like boats because Toraja people believed that their ancestors came from Cambodia via boats.
*Reading Quiz—
1. How many ‘In Toraja’ and ‘Funeral’ are there in the paragraph?
2. How educational and interesting field trip it was?
3. What do you think about Ms. You-Know-Who and Mr. Caffeine-holic?
Posted by YoonJoong Kim 
I shooted AGAIN!
My bro saved it AGAIN…
3 Days Before Finals
