Parade Season in Honduras

I have learned that Hondurans are very patriotic and eager to seize every opportunity to parade in the streets.  In the last month or so I have been to three parades and we´ve had a number of national holidays.

The 15^th of September is a pretty big deal here as it is Honduran Independence Day.  School children spend months preparing speeches, poems and facts about important figures in Honduran history.  Also, High school marching bands prepare new songs and dances for the parade.   The festivities begin with a parade that goes on for hours and passes through almost the whole city.  The restaurant stalls sell a tonne of food – mostly fried stuff – and there is an army of ice cream vendors roaming around at all times. 

September 25^th was Bible Day and all the churches from all denominations in Santa María del Real got together and paraded through the streets all morning.  Each church had a banner, signs and even pickup trucks outfitted like parade floats.  At various points representatives from each church had the opportunity to give a 2-3 minute message.  The rest of the time was spent marching, singing and praying for peace and prosperity in the community. 

October 3^rd marked the beginning of Catacamas´ annual fair and of course was inaugurated with a parade.  My husband is currently working on his business degree with weekend classes and his work group was chosen by the university to make a float for the event.  I helped Isaí and his classmates out as they put together an enormous float promoting the university and highlighting the urgent environmental issues in the region.  The float featured a kind of before and after scenario.  At one end were beautiful green mountains, a flowing river, animals and real plants and shrubs, while the other end held denuded forests, a saw mill, hunters, a dried up river, dying shrubs and a few endangered species. 

The float turned out really nice and lasted for about an hour in the parade – that is until it starting pouring rain and a ruined pretty much all the parade floats.  It was a bit of shame but that´s how things go this time of year.  Right now it rains for at least a couple hours every afternoon and in the evening we get lightning storms. 

The power outages continue so once or twice a week we are without electricity for a couple of hours in the evening.  Sometimes there are schedule outages on Saturdays from 10am until 5pm which can be tough on small grocery stores and meat shops that can´t afford a diesel generator to maintain their products fresh.  I usually don´t keep a lot things in the fridge for this reason.  I was joking with my neighbour the other day that at least it gives me the opportunity to defrost the freezer when we´re without power the whole day!