Feria Patronal de Ocotepeque

Every city, town, village, and pueblo of Honduras has a town "fair" once a year to celebrate the place's patron saint. Ocotepeque celebrates its feria from the 10th to the 19th of March. During this time vendors come from Honduras and El Salvador and set up booths selling tons of fried things and crap that is made in china (shame that with all of the local artisans that do beautiful work, people here still prefer their plastic wares). There are also many sketchy looking rides that have been set up on top of 2x4s and cinder blocks. For some reason, these ferias are pretty popular and tons of people come from all around to eat drink (alot) and be merry. Both weekends saw the biggest influx of people that came to partake of the festivities.

I have been playing basketball with a group of guys here in the afternoons and I recently found us a league in Santa Rosa (a bigger city about 2 hours away from my site) that we are going to start in April. Our team invited a few teams from this league to play a tournament in Ocotepeque as part of the feria and they agreed to come out. We planned the four-team tournament for the first Saturday of the feria. In the week leading up to the the game we spent time repainting all the lines on the court, putting up new nets, fixing the rims, and cleaning things up around the court. On Saturday, the court looked the best I had ever seen it. When the teams started warming up for the games, people took note and by the time the first game started, there were probably 150-200 people around the court curious to see what was going on (basketball is a pretty foreign sport to them). We also had some food vendors and announcers in the mix. Other than having to deal with a little bit of sun and heat, the event was a success and the other teams were impressed at how well the event was organized. If you are wondering which team won the tournament, I'll give you a hint. It was the one that had the tall skinny gringo on it:)

A team picture before the games got underway

Look at that intensity!

After the games, there was a concert in the park on Saturday night. Polache, who is probably the most famous singer here (look him up on YouTube), came to play. A few other volunteers came into town to watch the tournament, see the feria, and go to the concert. We were all invited to an "exclusive" after-party with Polache too. There were thousands of people at the concert, but no matter where I stood, I had a pretty good view because I am about a foot taller than the average Honduran. haha. All in all it was a pretty fun day and I am hoping to plan the second annual basketball tournament for next year.

PC friend Brianna, Polache, Me