Grave Concerns

On my way to the rice fields last week, I skirted the new hospital that is under construction.
Compared to the out of date, unsanitary, dark facility that it will replace, this place looks super, but I am curious about how much it will improve care. It's not unusual for private doctors in town to advise you NOT to go to the hospital if you have a problem. If the new facility has the same personnel, it's hard to know how much that will improve.

Just outside the hospital walls I walked through an odd landscape.


As far as the eye could see, there was a random collection of sand mounds of varying sizes. I wasn't sure if they were natural, and if not, why they were there. As I adjusted to the scene I saw that some of the mounds had markers which turned out to be tombstones.

I am a little surprised by this massive cemetery. Vietnamese have great respect for their ancestors and feel a strong obligation to provide well for them after death. They will normally spend a lot of time scouting out locations for tombs, paying a lot of attention to the principles of feng shui. You see a lot of these tombs right in the midst of the rice paddies being tended by workers. If possible, they build an above ground tomb to hold the remains and maintain it diligently. "Tomb Cleaning Day" is a national holiday toward this end. It is critically important to have descendants to care for you after death. This relates to Orangehelpers work because we have met families that had multiple handicapped children, hoping the next one would be ok and able to fulfill familial obligations, including maintenance of tombs and the family altars that adorn each house. This is at odds with the cemetery I had come upon. A small minority of the mounds had legible tombstones, 50-75 years old. A few others had markers with no discernable notation, but the majority had nothing at all.

Poured cement tombstone with inscription scratched in as it dried.

Headstone with no inscription.

Fresh incense on infant size mound with no other marker.

Tumbled headstones.

I was reminded of a neglected cemetery in Libya that I later learned was the old Jewish cemetery in town, part of a vibrant Jewish community until Middle East strife caused the Jews to abandon or be driven from the country. In that cemetery, it was common to see bones jutting from the sand. This cemetery had nothing like that. And the fresh incense on the one infant grave implies that this is not entirely abandonned with the passage of time. My best guess so far is that these are graves of the very poor.