Día de los Difuntos

Today, November 2, we celebrated here in El Salvador Día de los Difuntos (Day of the Deceased). This holiday is celebrated by visiting the graves of deceased family members to enflorar (which is not a real word, but basically means putting flowers on the grave) them. 

To give you a really clear idea of what this day is like, you first need a description of El Salvador cemeteries. When a person dies in El Sal, they are invariably buried. To mark their grave, there are 2 options: either a colorful above ground tomb, or a colorful cement cross. These grave markers are piled pretty tightly on top of one another, as there is not a lot of space in the cemeteries. On a regular day, an El Salvador graveyard is a pretty busy place. So when you take that cemetery, and add about 10 people per grave, laden with armfuls of flowers (real and plastic), along with vendors peddling their goods (fruit, water, candy, paint to touch up graves, plastic flowers) up and down the paths, you have a packed event. 

We traveled to 3 different cemeteries today - one in the caserío next to Santa Paula, one in the pueblo of Apastepeque, and one in the city of San Vicente, to enflorar various graves. The cemeteries got more and more elaborate, as well as more and more crowded as we moved from caserío to city, but one thing that was constant was the sense of celebration and duty. All day I kept thinking about what it would be like in the US to have a day like this (mainly because people were shocked that we don't have a day like this in the US). I don't think there is any way in hell that entire families would devote an entire day each year to visiting the graves of their various family members just to pay them memory. But here, it is done without question. Even the little kids who never met these dead relatives partake without complaint. I think that this is in part because death is more frequently a part of life here than it is in the US, because almost everyone has a sibling/cousin/child who died pretty young. Therefore, death is something that people are always aware of. This is pretty inextricably tied to the strong religious faith that everyone has here. People don't shrink away from talking about death or spending an entire day honoring their deceased relatives because people aren't as afraid of death here as they are at home. For example, on our ride home at the end of the day, my host aunt Dinora told me that she didn't like the idea of being cremated because she didn't want to show up in Purgatory burned. I guess if you were 100% sure that there was something coming after death, it wouldn't be so scary.

Host family at the grave of their father

host mom's father's grave 

vendors outside the cemetery

San Vicente cemetery