Stray Dogs and Garbage at the Graveyard

I went to a funeral service, sorry I mean Necrological service as that was what was printed on the program, and it was just as the title of this blog post says. First there were stray dogs roaming all over the place.

This little pupper was busy walking all over and rolling in the grass. Worn out he decided to a take a rest on this woman's grave. Surely she won't mind. But it was just a short rest because snack time was almost upon us. Everyone was scattered around the area munching on their cupcakes and sipping their mini Coke bottles. That was the cue for all the dogs to come out of hiding and begin begging for food and searching for scraps.

Of course a wheel barrow full of garbage is the jackpot for any discerning dog. These dogs are not discouraged from hanging out in the cemetery.  Here are the gravediggers feeding one of the dogs.

They probably have some comically morbid name for him.  Maybe Yorick? 

Second of all there was garbage.  I don't mean the garbage from snack time. I mean in the soil in which the man was being buried. Take a look for yourself.

I have no idea how that garbage got there because it is embedded in the dirt 4 or 5 feet down. How did it get there?  This cemetery is only a few years old. Before the cemetery it was just brush. Maybe the Philippines is just that dirty? 

Seeing this reminded me of some pictures sent to me a few months ago which I have refrained from publishing because I did not have enough information about them. A reader of this blog was at a funeral and noticed there was trash in the soil and he discreetly took a few pictures.

The first picture has very recognisable bits of absolute trash. There's glass bottles, shoes, and concrete (maybe rocks?). There is more garbage in the pictures he took than in mine and I do not understand how the garbage ended up in the grounds of either cemetery.

The person who sent me these pics thought perhaps the cemetery, Forest Lake Maa in Davao, used to be a landfill. It's possible. I don't think that's very likely though. A few months back I wrote Forest Lake an email which included the pictures but I never heard back. 

Could it be that years of open dumping have thoroughly polluted the soil of the Philippines? That somehow the trash made it's way into the earth through some slow process of pedogenesis (that means soil formation)?