My town’s festival: sedated revelry?

Just this past week, San Luis Planes celebrated its annual feria patronal (patron saint’s festival). Last year only the Catholics celebrated it, carrying a small statue of Saint Louis around town, but this year, a secular committee formed and they planned a series of events that eventually made the Catholics decide not to participate, heh. And, before I knew it, my tranquil small-town Peace Corps life was shaken up by travelling sideshow-attraction people, gamblers and drinkers, horses, roosters, pigs, beauty queens, soccer and pool tournaments and a general atmosphere of revelry (albeit seemingly guilt-stricken and sedated). The following is a summarized list of what my small town did to celebrate its feria and of my interpretation of it all, as an integrated yet sarcastic foreigner. This is a very long post, so read what interests you and/or go to the bold sentences/photos to get the quick gist:

1. Traditional (and non-traditional) Honduran games/competitions

2. Typical “cultural stuff”

3. Carnival games

4. Atmosphere (ie. the ever-present peace-disturbing aspects of celebrations here)

1. Traditional (and non-traditional) Honduran competitions:

These traditional Honduran competitions were my favorite events of the feria. They felt, for the most part, quite genuine to Latin American/ Spanish-influenced culture, not so affected by America (which other events certainly were).

Carrera de cintas: the coolest event, hands-down. 10 participants from the local horsing circuit took turns racing their horses down a stretch of road towards a line that was hung between two posts. About six or seven small rings were clipped to the line. The riders tried to catch a ring with a metal “pencil” they were carrying as they galloped under the line. If they got a ring, they were presented a bandana and a kiss on the cheek by one of the bandana girls (all of which were definitely minors) and, at the end of the day, the rider with the most bandanas wins. It was exciting and looked very challenging and got by far the biggest attendance.

Palo ensebado: it reminded me of some traditional Basque competition in the Andes of Spain. A tree trunk of about 25-30 feet, with its bark scraped off, was rubbed down with animal fat and stuck into the ground. On the top was placed an orange flag. The first person to climb all the way to the top of the pole and retrieve the flag wins. Anyone and everyone in town can try. It was very Arthurian, you could say. Only men tried it, and had no problem stripping down to their skibbies and betting all-too intimate with the pole. It was very, very slick and it took a solid couple hours of relentless trying for someone to finally make it to the top. 

Gallo enterrado: poor, poor gallo. Translated, this event is the ‘buried rooster.’ A hole was dug in a corner of the plaza at night, secretly, and a live rooster was placed in it and buried up to its neck. Then participants were blindfolded, spun around, handed a stick, and given 2 minutes to stumble around and try to find where the rooster was buried, and smack its head off. The participant to successfully kill the innocent and scared-to-death rooster gets to keep it and make rooster stew, a favorite dish here on the mountain. Of course, with the entire crowd watching screaming and giving false instructions, it was kinda hard to hear the rooster’s crows, though it only took three participants before it was killed. For me, it seems like nothing more than plain old animal cruelty. But for everyone here, used to the culture surrounding cock fights, it was great entertainment.

Baby pig catch: perhaps another example of being not so nice to innocent animals was when the committee slathered up a baby pig with lard and let it loose to run away from a crowd that was trying to catch it. The person to successfully catch and hold onto the pig would get to keep it, not a bad freebie for around here, considering that a grown pig sells for upwards of L1000 (apx $50). Sadly, for the pig’s immediate sake, it was too scared to run, as the crowd had intended/expected, and it ended up getting dog-piled by about ten or so people, who decided the only fair way to split up the winnings was to do exactly that. So they cut it up into pieces and distributed the unfortunate pig among the 10 of them right there on the soccer field.

Sports: Naturally, there were no sports for women to participate in, though for my part, we gringos tried to change that. On the first Sunday of the event, there was a typical cuadrangular de futbol, a 4-team soccer tourney, in which teams from three neighboring towns challenged my town’s team. It drew a large crowd and was fun to watch. The winning team walked away with something like L1000 (apx $50) to split between the players. The next day, was a just-for-fun scrimmage between gordos and flacos (“fats vs skinnies”) ... older people who don’t usually play anymore and who perhaps aren’t as good as they once were in their youth. They tried to get me to play in the game, but since I didn’t fit appropriately into either weight category and since I wasn’t ready to totally embarrass myself along with the old guys, I just watched instead. We shamelessly laughed when somebody whiffed the ball or fell down. Of course, I secretly knew that would’ve been me had I played, heh.

There was also a billiards tournament, but since the pool halls in my town are pretty small, there was hardly a turnout. It is culturally inappropriate here for women to play pool or even enter a pool hall, so again, it was only men participating.

But finally, perhaps the most interesting sport for people in my town was Ultimate Frisbee. Alicia and I thought it would be a lot of fun to invite some of our friends/fellow PCVs up for the opening day of the feria to challenge my soccer team to an Ultimate tourney. We had to teach them how to play ahead of time, so as not to embarrass them too much. 14 gringos and gringas (we had just about even distribution) took to the field and shocked my town by throwing a plastic plate around. It was basically a gringo parade, but was a lot of fun. My town’s soccer team actually learned very quickly and, by the end, was playing almost as well as we were. We tried to convince local girls to play with their team, but to no avail. All in all, Team America still won, but only by a few points. (We were able to play thanks to the Aerobie that the fam sent.)

2. “Cultural stuff”:

Honduras as a country sometimes suffers from being a small place within very close proximity to America, the cultural giant just across the Gulf of Mexico. Meaning, that sometimes American culture penetrates Honduran “traditions” even without Hondurans realizing it. Because of it, I’m often skeptical when I hear somebody talk about doing a “traditional Honduran cultural event.” In the case of my feria, however, most of what was claimed to be authentic, wasn’t so bad.

La Mojiganga: Considering that my house is right on my town’s central plaza, I had a perfect place to view many of these events. The prime example would be that, out of the blue on Saturday, la Mojiganga came waltzing up and plopped itself right in front of my house. She was a paper and wire giant that reminded me of the parade-giants they march through the streets in Pamplona during San Fermines after the bull runs. In Trinidad, Santa Barbara here, a town about 20 miles north of my town, they set fire to Mojigangas to celebrate their feria. Anyway, our Mojiganga danced around the plaza and kids got up on stilts and danced with her. Other kids played around with wooden boxcars and wheelbarrows that were allegedly used by their grandparent’s and great-grandparent’s generations. The strange thing is that no one could really explain what the Mojiganga represented or how the tradition got started.

“Cultural Night”: one evening they built a stage on one end of the plaza and hosted a sort of talent show for school kids. I would hesitate to call it cultural, however. Most groups of performers were 10-12 year old girls dirty dancing to pop songs, to the approval of their teachers (who happily canceled classes that day so the kids could prepare their presentations) and the rest of the town and culture as a whole. Of the other performances were joke-telling, lip-synching to Mexican rock songs, and some sort of competition between to volunteers over who could stuff the most refried beans into the face of the other. For me, Cultural Night was a big miss.

Beauty Queens: around a dozen 14-15 year old girls competed over who was more popular, and sought money contributions to prove it. The girl who collected the most money in her decorated box won and became Queen of the Feria. Then there was a formal “crowning” ceremony followed by a dance in the new Centro Social. Also, the winning queen would preside over the carrera de cintas and would kiss the winning riders on the cheek after presenting them their bandanas. I know we have beauty competitions in the States, but this idea made me slightly uncomfortable because of the lackadaisical attitude towards minority laws here. Then, the same competition took place amongst 6-8 year old girls. But the families really got involved and dressing their little girls up in poofy dresses became a big deal, as well as inviting the perfect little bowtie-wearing date to accompany them too. Okay, but just when I thought things couldn’t get any more inappropriate, the feria culminated in the crowning of the rey feo (King of the Uglies). And, since my house is owned by the family of the committee’s president, my yard became the default location where the handful of rowdy 20-30 year old boys changed into cheap drag queens! This in my quiet, conservative and religious town! Anyway, you can imagine the type of things that went on during the crowning of the rey feo. The next morning I woke up to find my yard strewn with popped condom-balloons and torn panty hose.

Dances: a couple nights, the Centro Social hosted live bands from Santa Barbara. Lots of people went to the dances and let loose, dancing bachata and punta, as well as general sloppy dancing. It’s not often in the year that people in my town are out later than 9pm, but these dances didn’t shut down until after 2am. Cover charges were steep, at more than L100 (apx $5), but it seemed like people found it worthwhile. Some people get rather intoxicated to attend such dances, but I think that we find that in the States too. The important thing is that nobody got shot.

3. Carnival games:

The travelling-carnival-games people showed up in my town around the first of the month and set up their wooden and tin casitas (shacks) directly on the main road that goes through the central plaza, ie just in front of my house. Bus routes were diverted for the entire month.

Sadly, similar to the sporting events of the feria, these “carnival games” didn’t have anything to offer the women of my town. I put “carnival games” in quotes because as it turned out, what they were actually offering wasn’t quite all that was promised. What they actually were was a string of gambling tables—cards, dice and roulette. It is considered inappropriate for women to gamble here. So instead, I saw men spend hours and hours and hours losing their hard-earned money on the tables. Gambling can be a major problem in rural Honduras, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. Worse yet, they let kids jump right in and play too, betting single Lempiras at a time. They’ll grow up to be good little gamblers themselves. Too bad nobody was there handing out cigarettes.

The only familiar carnival sideshow stuff they had were a bb gun shoot and a ring toss. Though I also didn’t see any girls or women try them out. They also installed a jukebox loaded with about five songs. Oh, and there was a mechanical swing that was hand-cranked! I only saw it used a few times, probably because it was so tiring to operate, heh.

4. Atmosphere (ie ever-present peace-disturbing aspects of celebrations here)

Let me stop myself for a second here. I’m realizing as I’m letting all this flow out here that I have gotten more and more sarcastic and negative about all this. I apologize. It may be coming off as immature and perhaps ethno-centric, these judgments of the feria. I don’t mean to be demeaning or offensive about things, I’m just trying to express my perspective accurately and honestly. I guess that when you live in a place that’s outside of your culture and norms, little differences can slip under your skin and add up over time and can end up really annoying you. I actually did enjoy parts of the feria and, at the very least, found it memorable. So hopefully you’re finding my ranting light-hearted as it’s meant to be, and not so obnoxious, heh. Let me continue with a little more ranting, then I’ll stop for at least a couple weeks.

To set the scene on the atmosphere that was created during this festival, I, along with my Frisbee-playing friends who were staying with me at the time, was waken up at 4am to an explosion in the plaza, literally. The feria committee relished the chance to wake up the entire town with firecrackers and deafening ranchera music, claiming that it was the “Alborada,” which is something cultural and traditional. They went on making unbearable noise for an entire hour. Luckily, this only happened two mornings during the feria instead of every morning, like promised. This would exemplify the nature of the general feria atmosphere for the rest of the week: loud and inappropriate noises all around.

Kids and adults (always the guys and never girls or women) would shoot off fireworks or light firecrackers no matter what time of day and no matter what was going on. During the crowning ceremonies, when people were giving speeches, during the horse races etc etc. It was like Christmas and New Year’s all over again, just two month’s worth dumped into a week.

Then there was the music. The carnival people’s jukebox had a very limited number of songs, but that didn’t stop people from poppin in their Lempiras and selecting those same songs over and over again. Then, just up the plaza from the jukebox speakers, another carnival table was blasting its own music in between rants by the dealer on a microphone calling out, “place your bets, place your bets, place your bets, place your bets, place your bets, place your bets, place your bets, place your bets.” So we usually had two songs going at once, and that’s if my neighbors didn’t have their own stereos on full blast. And don’t get me started on the MCs of the crownings and Cultural Nights, who didn’t know what to do with a microphone either.

Another ‘benefit’ of living right on the central plaza is that, with such an influx of people looking to gamble (or looking to stare at people gambling) comes and influx of boys and men needing to relieve themselves in public. I was woken up twice to the sound of flowing liquid right outside my house—twice! And there were countless times during the week when I stepped out of my house to be shocked by these fellows.

I will finish my novella of a blog post by talking about the generally strange behavior of people during celebrations here. And I’ve discussed this with other PCVs who have noticed this in their sites. But culture has it that people are at one of two extremes when it comes to celebrating ferias: Either they get uncontrollably drunk then violent and start fights and get into big trouble, or they are kind of sedated and super polite, not even applauding or dancing in public. I think that people get guilty if they are seen reacting to something that happens during a feria (perhaps because of strict religions here), or are just easily embarrassed and self-conscious. Or they’ve just never seen the point of showing their emotions in public. Mostly people seem to be content just standing around and staring at things that go on. This is quite different from celebrations in the US like Marti Gras in New Orleans or St. Patty’s Day in Boston or New Year’s in New York or basically any kind of concert or parade. Maybe it’s better?

My site!

Greetings from San Luis Planes, Santa Bárbara! Well, I made it to site. Everything is so new and exciting here that it’s going to be hard to sum up all that’s been going on in the past two weeks. I love the community and my family and my work. I think that that’ll be a good order to try and describe things:

1. Community
2. Family/community members
3. Work/ “counterpart”

1. Community. You wouldn’t believe how scenic San Luis Planes is (“San Luis,” for short—though not to be confused with the larger city of San Luis, also in the department of Santa Bárbara). We’re above 2000 meters here, though it’s probably closer to 2300 or 2400—which comes out to be more than 6000 ft above sea level. This little coffee town of about 1500 people is surrounded by the tips of mountains that are covered with a thick forest. Clouds roll through these hills everyday bringing in beautiful views, cool weather, and RAIN. It’s been raining about every afternoon and/or night so far. It feels like Peter Jackson could have filmed some movie here, it’s such a dramatic view. I don’t have any pictures that do it credit yet, but once I take a good one, I’ll post it. The one that I am posting is the view from my back yard.

I’m kind of isolated where I am, which is great (and something I had sort of hoped for). It’s the real deal Peace Corps. I’m about an hour and a half away from the city of Santa Bárbara, the capital of the department, and the place that I’ll be going to do banking, buying groceries and other necessities (and getting Internet and cell phone service—that’s right, I don’t have cell phone service in my site). Peña Blanca, another bigger place with stuff to do and buy, is about an hour away.

I’m also about an hour and a half from Lake Yojoa, Honduras’ largest lake. On the ride up to my site, Alex Rosales, my counterpart (see number 3) and I stopped at the lake and ate fresh tilapia on the veranda of a restaurant right on the lake.

The national park here has one of the best/most pristine cloud forests in the country and we get a lot of ecotourists because of it. My two PC neighbors are in the project called Protected Areas Management, and they’re working with a local committee dedicated to developing this. I joined them last week.

2. Family/ Community Members. The day before I got into town, my future host family decided that they couldn’t host me because the madre got sick. So, when I got to town, it was a surprise meeting a new family, that I didn’t have the facts on. But, I’m actually with the brother and his family. They have a six year old son named Erick who’s in the second grade, and a sixteen year old daughter Kelyn, who lives with an aunt and uncle in Santa Bárbara where she goes to high school. (The local school only goes to 9th grade). They’re friendly and patient. The dad (along with his brother) is a community leader and is well respected in the town. He owns around 10 “manzanas” of farmland up in the hills (manzanas, I think, are approximately equivalent to hectares) where he grows coffee.

I’m still in the community analysis phase of service, where I’m meeting everyone and gaining “confianza,” or building up trust and friendship. I’m going to be going around doing a survey this week, actually. It’s really amazing how nice people are, and happy they are to meet a gringo. Most of the people I meet think that I’m from Spain because of my strange accent. I hear lots of stories about other PC volunteers who have been here in the past (two married couples, most recently) and a few Spaniards who set up the carpentry shop in town. I know my way around town already, considering there are two roads.

Almost everybody here depends on coffee production in some way or another. Either they own land where coffee is grown, or they pick coffee for the landowners, or they work for the coffee coop where I’m working. The quality of coffee is very high and I think I’m in heaven. (But asking for it without sugar confuses people.)

3. Work/ “Counterpart”. So when our training directors went around the country doing “site development,” they looked for people and organizations in our future communities that we’d be able to work with. These people they match us with are called “counterparts” in PC lingo. Some volunteers work with their counterparts for all two years while others use their counterparts as a launching point to meet the community then start work on other things.

I have two counterparts. My main counterpart I’ve already mentioned. His name is Alex Rosales and he’s the manager of the coffee coop called Montaña Verde. He’s very motivated and really wants the best for its future. He is also an expert coffee “catador” and knows all the technical stuff about what goes into making the best cup of coffee imaginable.

Montaña Verde (see picture), as a company, was founded just in 2006 with the help of an international NGO called CARE. Officially, it’s a coop of coops, that coordinates the efforts and production of 5 separate companies from five different communities in the zone to process and then export coffee. It has 56 members and buys additionally from more than 200 independent producers. All the coffee it buys and processes (11 “lotes,” or 4,125 “quintales,” or 412,500 lbs) is exported to Canada and sold there by a distributor under the brand name of Van Houte. I’ll be helping the company revise its business plan, implement a digital inventory control system, updating its accounting system, helping to broaden its marketing and diversify its financing, among other things. In the process, I’m learning all about coffee and its production. I couldn’t be more excited.

My second counterpart is the principal of the local school, where I’ll be teaching computer skills (once they get the computers set up, heh), as well as English and maybe some environmental stuff too. I am also planning on starting a journalism group with some of the kids, as well as perhaps a chess club.

As far as other work, I’m also coordinating with the ecotourism project. I am also helping with the “Patronato,” the local town council or alderman’s board, to write a work plan and help prioritize their efforts. Who knows what else I’ll be getting into in the next two years? I’m a “community resource,” according to the Peace Corps, and I want to pitch in wherever I can. Once I get to know people more, I’ll be able to understand their needs better.

Site Assignments

Happy Mothers´Day to all the moms out there.

So this past week was our last week in Ojojona doing Field Based Training. We are all back in Zarabanda for one week left in training as a whole, then we´re all off to our sites in different parts of the country. Most of us are heading for the West, since there seems to be the most need there. This past Wednesday was "site assignment day," in which they told us where we are going to be spending the next two years of our lives. Our training director taped masking tape down on the floor of our meeting room in the shape of a big Honduran map and placed placcards where all the sites were, then made us wait as he called our names for where we were going.

I lucked out and got everything that I wanted in a site. And, in my opinion, I got the coolest place in the whole group! I will be in San Luis Planes, Santa Barbara, a town of about 1400 people an hour and a half from the department capital (Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara). I wanted a small site because it would be safer, friendlier, and easier to get "integrated," this mystical term that people throw around all the time. I will be working with a coffee cooperative there, helping with bookkeeping and best practices. I was pushing for a coffee coop all during training, and cant wait to start. Ill also be helping out in the local school giving English and computer classes to students and teachers, hoping for "sustainability." What´s more, is that there is a lot of room for developing tourism there. The cool part about my site is that Im very close to Lake Yojoa, the largest lake in the country. Plus, Im in the mountains that pertain to a national park where famous cloud forests are found. Lots of hiking in my future.

Cant wait to start. Much love from Honduras. See you on the flip side.