Can you stay, live, and work in the cemetery? Manila North Cemetery, opened in 1904, is one of the oldest and largest in the Philippines. Its elaborate mausoleums and endless rows of humble, stacked tombs are home to an estimated one million of the dead — and a few thousand of the living. It is inhabited by people who pull bones from tombs to move in.
It’s an entire slum community, populated by gang members, runaways, s$x workers, and laborers who rank among the poorest of the world’s poor.
In the Phi
lippines, public cemeteries are home to not only the dead but to the living – providing thousands of families with an escape from the country’s overcrowded slums.
School classes are held inside a mausoleum, kids are flying kites and playing basketball in between graves, and families are sleeping on top of tombs and spending their days among the dead.
Despite the misgivings of local authorities, the communities in these graveyards have flourished, creating a practical culture where mausoleums double as homes and the dead are cared for and honored rather than feared.
The final resting place of presidents, movie stars, and literary icons, the cemetery is also inhabited by some of Manila’s poorest people. Many live in the crypts and mausoleums of wealthy families, who pay them a stipend to clea
n and watch over them.
Others find different ways to engage the economy of death and burial. “There is really no work here inside the cemetery, so I taught myself how to do this in 2007,” Ferdinand Zapata, 39, said as he chiseled the name of a dead man into an ornate marble headstone.
“This is the best job in the cemetery because you don’t have a boss,” said Mr. Zapata, who grew up in the cemetery and has raised two children here.
“The masons who make the niches and mausoleums can earn more, though.” As many as a quarter of Manila’s 12 million people are “informal settle
rs.”
Those in the cemetery prefer its relatively quiet and safety to the city’s dangerous shantytowns. The resourcefulness needed to live a life of such insecurity is on full display here.
In mausoleums, and in makeshift structures built over tombs, families go about their days. They chat,
play cards, and watch soap operas on TVs mounted near headstones or ornamental crosses.
“Sometimes it’s difficult living here,” said Jane de Asis, 26, who lives in a classically designed mausoleum with a son, two sisters, her sisters’ children, and her mother, who is paid to take care of it. “We don’t always have electricity and have no running water.
It’s especially hard in the summer when it’s so hot.” At night, people sleep on the tombs. The thought of that may be jarring, but for the residents it is a practical choice.
And many in this devoutly religious country see the boundary between the living and the dead as porous.
Electricity in these converted homes is jury-rigged, and most residents don’t have running water. At the few public wells, people line up with carts loaded with empty water bottle
s, waiting to fill them up.
Amid all of this, the normal business of a cemetery goes on. On a busy day, there can be as many as 80 funerals. Some cemetery residents, like the 54-year-old man who calls himself Father Ramona, are paid by visiting families to lead prayers at a grave. Father Ramona sometimes wears a T
-shirt bearing the face of Jesus.
The cemetery is so dense with tombs and crypts that a hearse often can’t reach its destination. Mourners must then carry the coffin the rest of the way, clambering over other tombs and through passageways between mausoleums.
Tombs are generally rented for five years. After that,
if the relatives stop paying, the cemetery administrators will exhume the remains, after a grace period. Discarded bags of skulls and bones, some tangled in the threads of the clothes they were buried in, are a common sight.
People leave offerings of snacks, drinks, and sometimes cigarettes at their relatives’ gravesides. Family members can often be seen there, saying prayers, lighting candles, or just chatting.
