Madagascar Edition
World Family Photo Box Day leads today's complete edition for Madagascar.
Daily Edition
Official observances, world days, local context, and everyday celebrations for people who need something worth reading, sharing, or talking about today.
A day for printed pictures, old phones, albums, names written on backs, and the people a household remembers together.
Families visit cemeteries with food, drink, and music, spending the day at the graveside of their loved ones. In Bolivia, you eat with the dead, you drink with the dead, and you tell stories about the dead until everyone is laughing. Grief here has room for joy.
Less elaborate than in Mexico, but still observed. Families gather, remember loved ones, and share food and stories. The cemeteries fill with flowers and the abuela tells stories about the family members you never met but feel like you know.
The day after All Saints' Day is for the remembrance of the dead, and the tradition is to visit the tombs of the ancestors, light candles, and share a meal at the graveside. The Malagasy have a unique relationship with death: the dead are not gone, they are present, and the living must maintain the relationship through the famadihana (the turning of the bones), the joro (prayer ceremony), and the daily offerings of food and drink at the tomb. The tomb is the most expensive building a family will ever construct, and the tombs of the wealthy are built of stone, painted white, and decorated with the skulls of zebu sacrificed at the famadihana.
You encounter the Arabian oryx, the hamadryas baboon, and the Arabian leopard as iconic wildlife native to Yemen's varied terrain. You observe that Yemeni people traditionally keep goats, sheep, and dogs as essential domestic animals. ACADA celebrates the world's pets, and helps assure better care.