Todos Santos

These days are All Saint's and All Soul's Days, and it is a big thing where we live. At noon on November 1st, souls come back to their homes on Earth and visit with their families. To prepare for their visits, families prepare the favorite foods of their departed loved ones.

Here is a table prepared in the community of San Pablo just up the road. Families bake bread people (t'antawawas), bread ladders and bread horses, and put out plates of favorite foods, and fruit and coca. The picture above the table is of a nursing student from the college, Bautista, who died in 2007.




Here are some kids and a community leader praying at the table prepared for the souls visiting my Godson's house. People come all morning on November 2nd and pray in front of the table for the souls visiting the house. The family then gives them bread and fruit.




After praying, the adults sit and reminisce about the past. I heard some incredible stories about "the old days." One man's father, practically a slave in the old hacienda system, had his wife chosen by the hacienda owner; a woman teared up and she remembered losing her first three babies to early deaths; another remembered running away to La Paz and working at a restaurant until her mother found her a week later and dragged her home. (Most of what was said was in Aymara, and went right over my head.)

There was also a group of men who played the drum and traditional flutes called pinkillas to accompany the souls as they visit each house. They said that some of these traditions are being lost as the new generations lose interest in their parent's "backward" traditions.




Tomorrow the families will go to the cemetery and give out more bread and fruit to the people that come to pray over their graves.