2008 Woodie Awards
Vote Absentee
Spring break Honduras style
Michele Gourley
Issue date: 4/10/08 Section: The Scene
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Semana Santa, otherwise known as Holy Week, begins on what is commonly known as Palm Sunday and ends on Easter Sunday.
This being said, it is also the unofficial spring break for the entire country; schools close, stores shut their doors and taxi drivers take their taxis to their pueblos to visit friends and family.
I began Semana Santa by travelling to La Ceiba, a city on the northern coast of Honduras to visit some friends living there. There's a saying in Honduras that states: "Tegucigalpa thinks, San Pedro Sula works and La Ceiba celebrates."
With the easy-going attitude of the locals, at least the ones I met, it was easy to believe such a saying.
Besides eating fish, and lots of it, while in La Ceiba, I took a trip to the community of Sambo Creek to take a small boat to an island a few miles off shore.
On this island, Chachahuate, live a community of Garifuna, an ethnic group of Honduras whose ancestors are believed to have come from Western Africa.
Since everyone leaves Tegucigalpa and comes to the north coast for Semanta Santa, I decided to travel in the opposite direction: from La Ceiba to Tegucigalpa.
A few years ago, I spent a summer volunteering at a non-profit clinic in Tegucigalpa and lived at a nearby seminary. I was eager to return to the seminary where I had made many friends, even though I knew that many of them had left the capital for Semana Santa. As expected, when I arrived, most of the taxi drivers had left the city as had most of its inhabitants.
I have learned that true friends are those who, even though you haven't seen each other in years, can start all over again at first glance as if no time had ever passed since the last visit.
And those friends I made in Honduras many years ago are those type of friends. We spent Thursday visiting the nearby towns of Santa Lucia and Valle de Angeles, known for their artesenias, or souvenirs. Popular Honduran souvenirs include ornately carved, mahogany boxes and black and white pottery after the style of the Lenca Indians.
In honor of Good Friday, we travelled to the center of the city where many of the streets were covered with alfombras, paintings made of sawdust depicting various religious scenes that lead to the Catholic Cathedral in the central park.
Almost an hour passed as I wandered from street to street, mesmerized by the intricate designs of these temporary sawdust works of art and the workers who labored diligently to create and maintain them.
Though not of the Catholic faith, I couldn't help but appreciate the workers' faith and dedication as they spent their few days of vacation kneeling on the hot, hard pavement of Tegucigalpa to create a piece of beauty that would soon be trampled and swept away within a few hours.
It made me reflect on my own faith and beliefs and whether or not I was dedicated enough to my beliefs to give up one of the few days of my vacation to participate in something that would help others understand and appreciate that which I believed and valued.
That night, my friends and I shared a typical dish of Semana Santa, fish soup. Have I mentioned that fish is a popular food during this week?
Food, friends and family, faith, and of course, fish. It was definitely a Spring Break I soon won't forget.