Peace and order in cemetery celebration

At a Cabinet meeting held in the Land Transportation Office last Monday, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo approved the measures presented by Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board Chairman Elena Bautista and Land Transportation Chief Assistant Secretary Annalyn Lontoc to ensure proper security this coming All Soul’s Day celebration. The measures were called Aksyon Agad. We are vey glad about this because the annual cemetery celebration has never induced any form of violence but with the present problem we are having with international terrorists, it is better to take precautionary measures.

President Macapagal-Arroyo also took the added measure that would ensure the government employees would be able to be in their respective towns to pay homage to their dead. All Soul’s and Saints days happened to fall on a Saturday and Sunday, so she declared Friday a non-working holiday for people in the government.

There was a time when the deceased were buried in the churchyards. Remnants of this era remain in old churches. If one visits San Agustin Church in Intramuros, one still sees the tombstones of people who have been buried there. Later, the towns grew and the number of the dead had grown to the extent that there was no room in the churchyards to accommodate all the graves. And so cemeteries came into being.

The first measure that Aksyon Agad adopted was to maximize safety in all public utility vehicles. They will be on the look-out for illegal operators and make sure that there is no overloading of public vehicles going to the cemeteries. At the same time, they will deploy and alert more neighborhood mobile and foot patrols in resident areas to prevent robbers from taking advantage of the absence of homeowners.

In the cemeteries, they will install Libreng Tawag telephone booths around the cemeteries so that the people there can be in touch with their homes. "Help Desks" will also be established in bus terminals nationwide to help guide those who leave and arrive during the two-day celebration. In the cemeteries, the use of liquor will not be allowed, visitors will not be permitted to bring any weapons or loudspeakers. The same thing was done last year and it helped make All Saints and Souls the peaceful and orderly celebration it has traditionally been.

The word cemetery actually means "a sleeping place". It comes from the Greek word Koimeterion, a dormitory. In Persia, cemeteries are called "The Cities of the Silent".

Annually we go to visit our dearly departed in the cemetery and on our way there we can contemplate on the fact that our final trip will be our funeral and our ultimate end is the cemetery itself. After that, it will be other way around. We will not be visiting cemeteries anymore. People will be visiting us.