KALAG-KALAG jobs: Three kids spend school break cleaning graves

While other kids spend their schools’ semestral break on playing games with other kids or bonding with family members, two teenagers and an 11-year-old boy choose to go to the public cemetery to earn some cash by cleaning graves.

As early as 8 a.m., 14-year-old Anthony Jay Miñoza and his 13-year-old friend, Ramil Flores, would be seen walking to the nearby St. Joseph Parish Roman Catholic Cemetery in Barangay Guizo, the barangay where they both live.

Armed with a pint of paint, a homemade paint scraper, a paint brush, an empty mineral water gallon cut in half, and rugs, Miñoza and Flores will then do the rounds in the cemetery looking for clients, who will want the graves, tombstones or niches of their loved ones cleaned and repainted.

Working as a team
Miñoza said they work together as a team in repainting tombstones, hand lettering the markers and cleaning the graves for a fee that they would divide later at the end of the day.

They said they started cleaning graves since Oct. 20 and it had been quite slow the past week, since All Souls’ Day was still two weeks away.

P500 a day
But they said that they would expect to earn at least P500 each daily starting Saturday (Oct. 27) with the Kalag-Kalag drawing near.

“Akong kwarta kay ako ipalit og mga gamit sa eskwela ug ihatag sa mama (I will use the money to buy school supplies, and some of it, I will give to my mother)” said Miñoza when asked about what he would do with his earnings.

Miñoza said that this would be a big help because the earnings of his father, who works in a lotto outlet, would barely be enough for the family’s needs.
Flores also had a similar reason since his father’s earnings as a truck driver was barely enough for the family.

Both teeners’ mothers are housewives, and they both come from large families with Miñoza, being a second child of five children, and Flores,being a third child out of six children.

Both teeners are also first year students of Tipolo National High School.

They said that they had also asked permission from their parents to clean graves to earn money.

While Miñoza and Flores worked as a team, 11-year-old Janmarie Sevillano, a Grade 6 student who also lives in the same barangay, would do the cleaning on his own.

Sevillano, whose mother is a saleslady and a widow, said he would earn more by working alone, which he proved with the P700 he earned on Saturday.

He said he was not afraid to work in the cemetery because he knew that his father, who had passed away last January after a bout of hepatitis, would watch over him.

“Okay ra man sad ko kay nalingaw ra pud ko sa akong trabaho (I am okay with it because I enjoy the job),” said Sevillano, who has three other siblings.

He, however, said that with the Kalag-Kalag drawing near, many other kids had also taken advantage of the opportunity to earn, and he was expecting stiff competition for cleaning graves in the coming days.

Aside from the children, Renato Mendoza, 56, an electrician, is also taking advantage of the Kalag-Kalag celebration by offering his expertise to relatives, who would want the graves of their loved ones well lit.

He said he would charge a P400 daily fee for making sure the graves of his clients would be lighted.

The four of them are just among the many people who flock to the cemeteries to earn cash by offering their services to relatives visiting the dearly departed loved ones buried at the cemetery.

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