Dwelling with the Dead – Life in Pasay City Cemetery

“Do you want to see a lemur?” Jojo pointed forwards, down an alleyway created by two rows of headstones.

“Yes! There’s a lemur in this cemetery, too?”

I scrambled over a pile of trash to keep up, disturbing yet another cloud of flies.

Normally one would be skeptical of meeting a lemur in a cemetery. However, I’d already seen a treehouse, a champion cockfighting rooster, a two-month old baby and a woman watching C-Span … while sitting indian-style on tomb. The Pasay City Cemetery is a place of many wonders, and I figured at this juncture, a jungle primate was entirely possible.

Jojo and I arrived at an open-air mausoleum with a headstone advertising a burial date of 1874. Located by the front main gate, this was – according to Jojo – one of the oldest sections in the cemetery.

He began to dig around in a massive black trash bag at my feet. I looked around for the monkey.

That’s when Jojo pulled out the first bone. “Femur,” he said proudly, holding it up for me to see.

Communication. Break. Down.

More fishing around in the bag and out comes the skull. Then the bottom jawbone. A person was put into this trashbag, and without enough money for a burial plot, the body has remained here – from 1996 until now.

Yep. The Pasay City Cemetery is one of the craziest places I’ve ever been.

(Note To Self: Learn Tagalog words for femur and lemur so that this confusion never happens again.)

As disturbing as it is to think that there’s been a human body decomposing in a trash bag in this place since ‘96, it’s ironically one of the most inviting places I’ve visited in Manila.

There are 10 families that live inside the cemetery gates, existing in small apartment-like structures built around and on top of the mausoleums. The paths between interments act as roads, creating what is a makeshift, graveyard village. At the front gates, the dwellings are smaller and more scattered, but as you make your way to the back, there are multi-unit structures created by tarps hung from the trees, where several groups are living together.

Take Vilma, for instance, who’s been living here for over 30 years. She lives with three other women and has nine grandkids, including a two-month-old new addition. Vilma was excited to introduce me around to everyone, making the boys pose for photos and lovingly instructing one that his face desperately needed a scrub.

She explained that there is electricity here, with lights strung up once the sun sets. But there’s no running water. You have to leave and bring buckets back in to shower, cook and clean. For Vilma, and several others, this is home. She does not pay to live here, but some of the families do send some rent money to the city. A few of the residents live in this treehouse.

“We only have to leave one time per year,” Vilma explained, in nearly perfect English. “On the Day of the Dead in November, it’s a big holiday and many, many people come to see their relatives here.”

Other than those first days in November, Vilma and the other cemetery citizens stick around, buying what they need from a little bodega store that one family opened, cooking on propane-fueled hot plates and laughing at the occasional squabble between the various cats and roosters. There are a lot of roosters.

“Just over there is the cock fighting place,” Jojo said, pointing over a back wall created by cremation place markers, where the crowing flows out loud and clear. “There’s a big fight tonight.”

Jojo’s been the caretaker here more than 20 years. He showed me where his father and mother are buried, weaving down another lane to his first wife’s tomb. He came to live here when he was nine-years-old. Jojo now has a second wife, three children and four grandchildren – all living here. His brother lives in an apartment just overlooking the cemetery walls.

I wasn’t quite sure of protocol after the hour I spent with Jojo and Vilma. I offered to pay for the tour, but they just laughed. “Do you have Facebook? We have Facebook!”

I scrawled my information on some foil torn from a cigarette pack and shook hands all around. Hours later in a cafe across town, I accepted a friend request. I’m going to head back later this week with a soccer ball for the kids … but if you head to Manila, Pasay City Cemetery is top on my list of “don’t-miss” destinations.