A Day at the Cemetary


Halloween is non-existent in Guatemala, but it does correspond with Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead). This year is my first year experiencing this holiday. The big festivities in the graveyard, where I hope to see many skeletal effigies. I hear folks bring the family and have a picnic with the dead. This will be my first time eating amongst the non-living. I did have a frightful meal today, which is about the only Halloween scare Išve had so far. The dish is a typical Guatemalan meal for Dia de Los Muertos. It is a mix of 25 different meats (most look like dejected hotdogs or intestinal innards, and sliced sandwich meats), hard boiled eggs, corn, cabbage, broccoli, green beans, all over a bed of pickled beets, severed cold in a bowl lined decoratively in lettuce leaves. It looked like someone took a bad trip to the salad bar. Sabrina, my best friend, ate it and suffered mild bellyaches. I took a few bites, then thought the better of it and made some tortilla soup. The funny thing about this meal is that it is very coveted and desirous. The whole year is spent dreaming about the initial moment of snarffeling this atrocity. Our neighbor who gave us the "special salad", took an entire week to make it. Not only this but she had been talking about it for months, along with many other people at Sabrina's school. Claudia (our neighbor) took orders from families for the dish, charging a high (nearly priceless in Guatemalan economies) $6.00 per bowl. Ours was free. I think it was an attempt to clue us in on local culture and give us an authentic experience of the holiday. It gave us that, plus belly aches to boot.


You already know that Halloween does not exist here as it does in the States. Asking around, the reason for the lack of celebration was as follows:" Halloween is the day of the devil and here we are the children of God. We do not indulge the devil by celebrating on that day." Oh well, I hope kids back in the USA did some fine worship of the underworld with sacks of candy and ridiculous costumes.


The day following Halloween, Sabrina, Gregg, and I headed off to the cemetery, the most popular place to spend Dia de Los Muertos. The place was packed. Starting two blocks before the graveyard, booths selling greasy fried foods and cheap useless gadgets where smooshed sidewalk to sidewalk, leaving barely enough room for shopping space.


I got the consumerist urge and bought Sabrina a homemade pinwheel mounted on a stick (she had been seriously eyeing it, and the wind was perfect for whirling). We meandered through the maze of noise and fragrances.


Sections of the street were reserved for games, the most popular of which are music booths, lined up 12 in a row. Imagine little boxes, about the size of an empty apple box turned over on its side. This box is then decorated with the wildest reflective tape, glitter, and stickers. That is just the background for the main attraction; thematically dressed dolls, posed in various states of action. Some popular themes are cowboys, karate, chefs, rock stars, etc. The dolls are suspended from the top by string, giving them a limp, but nearly life-like look. In case you miss what the theme of any particular box is, you just have to look above it to the title written in flashy paint, which reads something like: "Rock n Roll Party" or " Wild West". Above the title is a metal piece about the size of a fist. The object of the game is to shoot a gun and hit this piece, which then begins a series of doll gyrations to a ten second deafening soundtrack of random music that has nothing to do with the action in the box. These are by far the most popular game at the fairs, not to mention the loudest. We got in a few short dance moves while passing the booths, but couldn't get into a real groove cause the music only lasts ten seconds. Sabrina got a few shoots with her camera of these famed booths. The men who owned them were proud to have them preserved on film and felt all the more famous for it.


After this excitement, we headed into the cemetery with a river of other folks (there were easily a few thousand people there). All the gravestones and sights were decorated with new flowers. It looked like a botanical garden, the way the flowers hung from everywhere. Besides just putting cut flowers at the grave sights, fresh flowers are also planted in the dirt mounds. "Freshening" the dirt under which the body lies is important. In the wet dirt mound, plants are inserted, which will grow until next year. A man was walking around with various cans of paint offering his services of repainting gravestones. Many people had partaken of his paint, giving the graveyard a feeling of newness. Families were everywhere laughing and running around. The graveyard is huge, when standing in the middle, you can look out across it and not be able to tell where it stops and the town starts. It is kind of eerie but beautiful.


We walked around in the graveyard for a long time pretending that we knew someone dead there, but we didn't, so we tried to pick out what grave site looked like a place we should spend the afternoon. Once we decided on when, we took to topical conversations appropriate for a graveyard: we discussed when we should make a will (deciding that first we need to own something before we could will it away), and the preferred method of burial, burning, or donating our bodies to science. Much of this is still up in the air.


Besides the town-folk playing graveyard gardeners for a day, Dia de Los Muertos is a huge day for kite flying. There are competitions all over for the best kite and the one that does the fanciest air dance (kite choreography). Sabrina had made a hoop-dee kite from some tissue paper and some sticks. It had a long white tail made from plastic bread bags. We jumped in with the best of them an attempted kite flying. Running willy nilly through the graveyard, over, around, and on grave sites. Our kite got a whooping 6 feet off the ground, held tight in the air by a spool of black thread that I had used to hem my ripped pants. Our kite didn't fly much, but was rather drug through the air with a series of elaborate running and screams of encouragement. We were the only non-locals there, but seemed to pretty much get the gist of it. All of the on lookers gave us the thumbs-up, a giggle, and a few how-to-fly-it tips.


We climbed to the top of a large hill in the graveyard where the kite flying was the most dense and serious. The sun was getting low on the horizons and was casting that perfect illuminating light on all the kites in the sky. The blue above was filled with variously colored air borne objects that caught the light. Underneath all that was us: thousands of people running around with kites, hopping over both ancient and fresh graves, laughing and not feeling a bit sacrilegious about playing amongst the bodies of the dead. It was wonderful.


Kite flying will never be the same.


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