Day of the Dead

Instead of Halloween, G. celebrates the Day of the Dead on November 1st. In the town we are living in, they stretched the event over two days since they have two cemeteries.

Saturday evening, we walked down to the first cemetery to see what it was all about. The cemetery was further away then we thought, so we arrived in the dark. The streets were packed with people! A lot of people were selling food, some with a proper food stand, and others with a fire right on the street with a huge pot of tamales on it.
The people believe that the spirits of their dead relatives are very near on this day. They paint the large tombstones, and decorate them with lots of flowers, evergreen branches and candles. When we approached the cemetery in the dark, it looked really neat with hundreds of candles burning. Although you would assume it would be a sad occasion for the people, it actually is very festive and people sit eating and drinking on the tombstones. Some people even hire musicians to come and play by the graveside.
November 2nd the same event happened at the cemetery on the other side of town.
In the foreground of the picture above, is the local laundry mat. Water is continually running into the basins and people come to do their laundry there.

There is a Catholic chapel on a small hill right across the street from the cemetery. I climbed the stairs a bit to get a better view of the event. As you can see in the picture above, the tombstones are very large and colourful.
Although it was interesting to see, it is a very sad reminder once again, of the emptiness of life without Christ. Drinking is very common here, but events like this only bring it out more. Just taking a brief walk through the tents, I felt very sad. Unfortunately, the 2nd was also a Sunday and church attendance was definitely lower.

Later in the week, we hiked up the hillside to visit a man who was in a car accident 5 years ago. He broke his back and is confined to a wheel chair. Wilf has visited with him on several occasions, but we all went along this time. He lives with his wife and 8 children in a house overlooking town. They have a great view! But they are very poor and of course it is very difficult for him to get around. The road doesn't look too bad in this picture, but it is really very rough in spots.

Here is the view from their house. The large white building is the Catholic church. Our house would be over to the left (you can't see it on this picture).