Futbol

I’ve lived in Olanchito for over half a year now, and every week (and sometimes every day) brings discovery, usually of something that is fascinatingly new to me but utterly commonplace to the people who have lived here their entire lives. Of the many things that I didn’t realize I didn’t know, I recently found out that Olanchito hosts a semi-professional soccer team. Given that Hondurans are so absolutely crazy about soccer that almost every single member of the population sides with a particular team, I feel rather clueless for not learning this earlier. This discovery came about now that my sitemate Lauren and I both find ourselves dating members of the same local team. Of course if we’re dating players, we have to go to a game, which we did this afternoon for the first time.

Since I had agreed to spend the early part of the afternoon helping some community women host a bingo tournament fundraiser for poor children, we arrived at the game near the end of the first half. We easily walked to the stadium since it’s less than a mile from the center of town, and bought tickets for the shaded section (we’re not trigueñas yet) at $3 a pop. We walked in to find the stands packed with perhaps 300 people, all of which appeared to be men. Hence many piropos and hisses followed us as we made our way through the crowd to sit in the front row of the covered concrete bleachers. With everyone watching us, we proceeded to watch the game. The home team, Sol (Sun, appropriate for a team based in sweltering north coast), was wearing green and yellow, and we quickly picked out Lauren’s muchacho, nicknamed El Travieso, playing number 8 offense. I didn’t see mine, but I didn’t expect to see him since he told me that he mostly sits the bench. Luckily Hondurans are much more fond of soccer than of gringas, and the testosterone-heavy crowd quickly forgot us, especially since Sol scored within minutes of our arrival. Roaring with all its small-town pride, the crowd jumped to its feet as the team’s theme song played over the loudspeakers. We screamed and clapped along as well as we could, Lauren with bronchitis and me with a bad cold. It was then that Lauren noticed that there was no scoreboard, and we had no idea who was winning. I turned to the little girl sitting next to me and asked the score, and she told me that we had just seen the first goal of the game. Good thing we came when we did, because it turned out to be the only one of the entire afternoon. Even so, watching the game was exciting, though as a former goalie herself, Lauren had a much better idea of what was going on than I did. Because of this, Lauren immediately recognized that my muchacho, Hernán, was the replacement goalie when he appeared in a red and black uniform, walking down the sidelines with a short string of other substitutes all in orange vests. I waved at him as he perused the crowd before entering the dugout, but he didn’t see me. I didn’t see much more of him, either, since he was never subbed in and sat out the second half with the other replacements.

I admit that even though I very much enjoy watching live soccer, checking out the stadium and the crowd at my first Honduran soccer game was just as riveting as the game itself. Though the stands were crude and there were no trash cans anywhere, the field itself was very well-kempt. Bicycles belonging to the fans, mostly without chains or locks to secure them, were cluttered in front of the stands. I noticed that there were more women and children in attendance than I had originally thought. I saw the stray dogs with mange and tattered ears, ubiquitous in Olanchito, sniffing among the discarded plastic soda bottles and food wrappers tossed into the grassy patch between the stands and the field. I gave a few of the crackers I was eating to a dirty shoeless child who sat down next to me and stared at me, obviously hungry, and then fended off three more just like him who suddenly appeared, demanding the rest of my crackers like petulant vultures. I winced every time a group of boys set off red strips of small but deafening firecrackers just in front of us, eagerly and fearfully jumping in and out of the popping sparks to grab at their small prizes. And once everyone had stopped looking at we gringas, I felt comfortable enough to do my own looking. I searched the crowd for familiar faces and found one in the back row, a student in one of the classes at the computer lab where I now work. We gave each other a friendly wave, and it felt good thinking that I now know enough people here that I can run into acquaintances without planning it.

After the game, Lauren waited with me in the small crowd milling around the locker room (a small unpainted cinderblock building on one side of the field) as I waited for Hernán to come out. While we waited, we chatted with another acquaintance, an expelled member of the team whom we had seen at the bar the previous two nights in a row (perhaps that’s why he was expelled). After a final team prayer in the locker room with the local priest, Hernán emerged and we left the stadium together with Lauren, who didn’t want to wait any longer for El Travieso. We walked up the dirt road toward the center of town, chatting a bit before Hernán realized that El Travieso was not in fact walking with us but was instead walking in small group of teammates only a few hundred feet behind us. He jokingly chastised Lauren for not waiting for her caballero and stopped in the middle of the road, forcing us to wait while El Travieso caught up. Once he did, we continued up the road as two pairs. Lauren and I half-smiled and half-grimaced in amusement and embarrassment as a pickup truck filled with most of the rest of the team raced past us, cheering at their teammates with the gringas.

El Travieso says he’s going mojado (literally “wet,” meaning going illegal to the States) at the end of January, and Hernán and I aren’t getting along very well right now for various reasons, so neither Lauren nor I may have many more moments like these. But when it’s all over, at least we will be able say that for a little while, we dated some of the most noticeable guys in town. Or maybe Hernán and El Travieso will say that about us.