Death On Roatan

 We are living on the same little gravel road as a cemetery.  Aside from a few jokes from taxi drivers as they drop us off (and one actually dropped us off at the main road because he refused drive by the cemetery at night) it's been a nice, quiet location to live.

This sign says, "Here rest our ancestors, where our future began.  We honor them because they gave us life, wisdom and hope.  We pray for them that their souls will rest in infinite peace.  Amen"

A lot of the graves are surrounded with cement blocks and then covered in decorative tiles.












The kids and I decided to clean up the graves and take pictures of them to upload to Billiongraves.com.

It took us quite a bit longer than we thought it would....

















Some had nice headstones like this.....

But unfortunately, many graves were not even marked anywhere!

They were just covered in tile with no name....

Others just had names scratched in cement....

Some just had a mound of dirt.....

A few weeks ago, these guys were out here digging with mere shovels for 3 days!

Not sure if it's a "dig your own family grave" or if these guys are the official grave diggers but I sure felt bad for them every time we walked by. 

Then, later that week, we got a real cultural experience.... to hear and see what a Latin American funeral is like.

Ellie came running in and said there was torturous screaming and wailing down the street.  We had to go see....like a car wreck....we had to look.  It was so sad to see the grieving group, arm in arm, faces distorted as they weeped and wailed for the dearly departed.  Quite a different experience than the somber funerals we have attended.

We're not quite done with uploading images for Billiongraves, but when we're done I think we'll have images and names transcribed for about 60 graves.