In the Philippines Your Corpse Can Be Exhumed and Tossed Into An Empty Rice Sack

At a funeral I noticed a strange triad of tombs on the outside wall of the cemetery.

The strange thing about these tombs is that none of them have proper memorial plaques. Instead it appears that the memorial was written on with a marker or painted on with black paint.

 Some of them look good.

Most of them look really awful.

I would guess families forgo fancy memorial plaques because of monetary costs. The expense of burying a loved one and maintaining their grave is very high in the Philippines. Many poor families are forced to rent a grave rather than buy one.

https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2108198/manilas-apartment-tombs-where-poor-bury-their

Caretakers also tend to the apartment tombs. Unlike more elaborate burial structures, which are bought and owned in perpetuity, apartment tombs can only be rented for five-year terms, after which the bones of the deceased will be evicted. Then there are two options: the bone box, a concrete ossuary not much bigger than a large shoe box; or the rice sack, labelled with the surname of the dead and tossed on to a tumbling pile in a tin and breeze-block shed at the rear of the cemetery. 

For a fee, renewals on the lease of an apartment tomb were offered before 2008. Then the Pasay City Public Cemetery was taken over by new management and, due to overcrowding, it said, renewals would no longer be granted.

Those are unclaimed human remains spilling out of torn rice sacks. In the Philippines if you cannot afford to buy a grave you will eventually be placed in a rice sack and tossed into an ossuary. This is appalling and even the poorest man does not deserve this indignity. But dignity has always been in short supply in the Philippines.