Show de LucesShow de Luces

In this day and age, you would think that fireworks would be pretty standard stuff. The Chinese had perfected the art hundreds of years ago, but somehow the proper workings of firework technology never made it here. We learned this the hard way when we set out to see what we thought was going to be a fairly basic and simple light show… we quickly learned how far off our thinking had been. While the fireworks were just as big and bright as any I’d ever seen, they were distinguished by two very noticeable differences: first, the fuses weren’t properly timed, with some fireworks going off mere meters above the heads of the onlookers (and one actually exploding in the unfortunate backyard of a nearby house less than a block away from us (just think about how loud fireworks are when they go off high up in the sky… yea, it was loud)); secondly, the burning pieces of the fireworks oftentimes didn’t properly extinguish, and people would routinely run for cover as the sky quite rained down fire onto anything in its path (trees, cars, houses, telephone poles, babies (okay, maybe not babies, but just about everything other than babies were put the test in terms of fire-resiliency)).

I’ve since heard that a movement is currently being undertaken throughout Honduras to ban fireworks of all sorts (being so unregulated, apparently people are regularly and severely injured by these displays). As people really seem to like lighting them off for all sorts of reasons (birthdays, because the power went out, because they woke up) and at all sorts of times (3 in the morning, during Church, because its dark out), I don’t know how successful this movement will be (as much fun as it was to be under the constant worry of having a smoldering ball of colorful light land on or around my head, I really hope something gets done).