Hondurans' second religion

Saturday, October 10th, 8pm. Life as usual stops in Honduras. All mental energy is focused on only one thing: soccer. This must have been one of the first days here without a word about politics. Honduras is playing against the USA with a chance to qualify itself for the 2010 world championships in South-Africa, this would be for the first time in 28 years. Every Honduran goes crazy for this game. And I'm lucky enough to be part of this.

Well, lucky, I started to see the consequences of my entrance ticket when I arrived at the Olympic stadium in San Pedro Sula. In between the enormous waiting lines, a gringo walks by in the jersey of Onyewu (a player on the US team) with his Honduran girlfriend, and is almost lynched by the Honduran fans that notice his presence. They are shouting: "Culero, culero" (just google "culero translation" for more information), and throwing whatever beverage they have in their hands towards his face. I quickly borrowed a Honduras jersey from Chepe, one of my Honduran friends here, and switched it for my other T-shirt I was wearing. Although my home in Belgium is a lot further away from the US than that of any Honduran, my white skin and blonde hair make me gringo. As from now on, I'm a (casi-)catracho, as the Hondurans call themselves. The US fan was by the way the only gringo I've seen in the stadium, there was not even one US flag.

But what an amazing experience, the stadium is filled to the top with 40,000 crazy catrachos, the waiting time between entering the stadium and the beginning of the game is 6 hours, the beer is cheap and the weather (after a tropical drash around 2pm) is great. I'm not a big soccer fan as some of you may know, but this had nothing to do with soccer, this was a religious experience.

A pity they lost the game (2-3), after a missed penalty, but Honduras still has chances to qualify. Tomorrow night at 8pm they play in San Salvador against El Salvador's national team. If they win and Costa Rica doesn't win against the USA, Honduras has a direct entry ticket to South-Africa, if not, they will have to play against (probably) Uruguay to secure the last ticket of the Americas. Life as usual will stop again...

In between crazy soccer games, the strategic plan for the palm oil cooperatives has come to the final stage. This week the presentation should be finished, ojalá (latin version of inshallah)... Last week there were some interesting proceedings.

One of the imminent problems of the palm fruit cooperatives is that since their creation in 1982, the cooperativistas have hardly thought about succession. More than half of them are older than 65 already and as palm fruit harvesting is a quite intensive process, time is running out. There are a lot of factors to consider (demographical, sociological, financial to name a few), so we decided to organize a focus group with sociologists, other consultants and some of the cooperativistas. Interesting ideas were brought up, but there doesn't seem to be a one-fits-all solution for their succession planning (or what did you think?).

Now I'm looking into the palm oil export market in Central America. Our client is quite a small fish in the pond and the 2 dominating industry players have a tight grip on the local market. If they want to grow, they will have to look outside of Honduras.

It will probably take a bit more time for the next post on my blog as Jeroen, one of my Belgian friends, is arriving on Thursday for a something-more-than-2-weeks visit. There is a lot on the menu: exploring touristic Honduras, crossing Guatemala and diving in Belize. I hope to tell you where to plan your next holiday to...