Todos Santos

Todos Santos (All Saints) is a Bolivian holiday celebrated around the same time as Halloween in the States. It´s my favorite Bolivian holiday (so far) and was the best bonding experience I´ve had with my host family thus far. There´s a few elements that I would like to take with me and incorporate into Halloween when I´m back in the States. Mainly, it´s just taking time to remember and (most importantly) celebrate the lives of the dead. I think it´s really nice to just set one day aside and remember people... because otherwise they can be too easily forgotten.

It reminds me a lot of Dia de los Muertos in Mexico. Basically, people take a day, or two, to remember and celebrate the dead. In my host family the day before Todos Santos we cooked a big meal making specific dishes that recently departed ones had liked and set a special place for them at the table. Then on the day of Todos Santos we had a delicious parillada (bbq) and headed over to the local cemetery to hang out and pay our respects.

This is the Cruz de los Viejos (Cross of the Old Ones) that greets you at the entrance of the cemetery and symbolizes all the ancestors that became before us. There must have been about a thousand candles lit underneath this brightly decorated cross.

This is my host mom Doña Ana and my niece Adriana, a real cutie. They are holding up pictures of Doña Ana´s son Rafa (passed away about two years ago) and her husband (five years). They were apparently both really into horses. Rafa was quite a popular, accomplished rider in Bermejo. He actually died in a tragic horse riding accident that I´ve talked about on here before.

This is Rafa´s and Doña Ana´s husband´s grave site. One of the prettier graves in the cemetery. I asked to go with them to the cemetery to see the graves. I was a little worried that Doña Ana might get emotional because I heard that she gets pretty emotional whenever talking about Rafa and I´m really not good in dealing with situations like that. But we just sat there in contemplative silence while other people would come up and pay their respects and Doña Ana would show them her pictures. The overall feeling at the cemetery was humm... how can I describe it? It was neither somber or overly festive. But it felt positive. Like people were genuinely remembering their loved ones, but happy to be there all the same.

I stopped to take a picture of the relatively more simple grave sites and this woman saw me and invited me to a drink which I was instructed to first pour some onto the grave as an offering to the decest. She told me about how the elderly woman in the grave didn´t have family when she became ill and that she took care of her during her last year and now she was the only one to visit her. I was touched by how this woman so openly shared her story with me. Definitely one of the most significant and personal cross cultural experiences I´ve had thus far.