family news

Joy graduates from her caregiver course today.

she will leave to visit her daughter in Canada tomorrow.

Kuya is busy at the farm with the rice harvest.

The puppies were up at dawn chasing the feral cats that come each morning to eat breakfast. Noisy but so far the cats are faster than the puppies, as long as I don't let George the Cat killing labrador off his leash to chase them.

Next week is Undas, so we will clean up Lolo's gravesite tomorrow.
It is All Saints day November 1 when we honor the dead by visiting cemetaries, cleaning up the gravesites, and spending time there eating a meal and visiting with other relatives.

This is done in other East Asian countries although more often in the spring, and often includes Buddhist ideas of the afterlife, but I suspect the idea predates Buddhism as it does Christianity here: Buddhists in the USA love to feel superior and are agnostic, but folk Buddhism includes the ideas of heaven and hell. However, the Philippines was never Buddhist, and Islam actually discourages the emphasis on honoring dead bodies, as a reaction to the waste of money in the olden days.

Sort of like the huge fancy maseoleums in the cemetaries here.

Lolo's grave is underground, as he wished, but no open land was available, so his plot is between two plain house like structures, so we had to put a roof overhead and a gate to keep out thieves etc. it doesn't work that well: they still stole the light bulbs from the ceiling. Sigh.

Lolo's mother and cousins buried here. He wanted to be buried here, but in recent years two cousins died and were buried in the plot, so no room unless we wanted another box. Some graves have three boxes one on top of another.

Lolo's grave under the floor: Usually the coffin is place in a box on top of the floor because the water level is 3 feet down. But he wanted to be underground, so the floor is actually raised so we could follow his wishes.

A young girl was murdered by her druggie boyfriend in the cemetary two years ago, so now they lock the gate at night to that part of the cemetary, but the older areas with just graves and no houses, where Lolo's mom and cousins are buried in boxes above ground but no house over them, is are not gated
.

In Mexico they call it the day of the dead, but if you saw that in two recent cartoons, it only shows the gouls not the Catholic part of that holiday, in the same way that the Celtic holiday of Haloween has morphed into demon worship.