¡La Feria del Fuego!

This last week my parents have been visiting me. Their visit coincided with the annually occuring biggest event in La Campa, the Feria. People had told me for months that the Feria is crazy, that thousands of people (tens of thousands by recent estimate), people from San Pedro Sula, Tegucigalpa, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, descend on the 500 person town of La Campa. Food, candy, and clothing vendors had been throwing tarp over wooden frames and displaying their goods on tables for weeks in anticipation, catching diminishing hours of sleep as the people flooded in. Because of the impossible logistics of providing shelter and sanitation services for 40 times a town`s normal population, Feria pilgrims slept under their own small sheets of plastic, under their trucks, on the street, or they didn`t sleep at all. A large hole had been dug across the river for defecation, but since it was a few minutes walk from the party and one would likely have at least a couple of simultaneously squatting neighbors, many instead opted for unoccupied patches of grass or dirt around town.

Its been like this for a long time. Saint Matthew, the patron saint of the local colonial church, has been performing miracles for a long time too, the lore of which (and the photo-wall in the church!) attract people far and wide by the horse, truck, bus, and big truck-load. I participated in the march of Saint Matthew around town, where all of La Campa`s old women get together and carry half-meter wooden Saint Matthew on a litter all around the town, singing repetative, enchanting songs about him. The procession follows a ways back, regularly complemented by a home-made rocket flying crazily from a mortar then two pockets of gunpowder ricocheting sucessive blasts off the canyon wall. The walk is only 600 meters long, but walking reverently up and down the mountain at the pace of old women weighed down with San Matias keeps us going for about an hour.

Later on, once my parents had arrived, there were guancascos, when catholic and indigenous customs meet. I found myself being passed by one of these processions one day, headed up by an intimidating-looking masked dancer holding a stick with a wooden lizard hanging from it. At night, these masked dancers and their lizards met the toro del fuego (bull of fire) in the area in front of the church. A volley of the same unpredictable home-made rockets and several more elaborate fireworks announced the meeting as they were launched from the hands of a group of young men on the church roof. The toro del fuego was a guy with a long tent-shaped thing on his head who jumped around the meeting place with the masked lizard-dancers while more fireworks were sent off. A few minutes later the fireworks from the church roof had stopped, but the toro del fuego was dropping military-sized firecrackers behind him and daring them to blast him as he performed his frenzied dance around their burning wicks. Soon a sparkler lit up on the side of the toro and, to my parents` and my shock, proceeded to launch several rounds of rockets from the top of the toro into the starry night sky. The combination of extremes made it the most exciting fireworks show I have ever seen.

The next day, a Honduran cowoker let me know that during celebrations in her village, the children love making their own toro del fuego. Apparently its great, but I was told that they have to be careful, because it can be dangerous! Who knew?