A Merry Christmas to all!

All right, to be honest, it is really hard to tell that Christmas is happening. It must be the temperature, but I really can´t imagine the event without the cold. However, I am enjoying myself here in Antigua and I´ll be with my old host family for the holiday. I think once I start talking to some folks back home, I´ll realize that Christmas is really going on.

As for work, life unexpectedly busy. We always heard how quiet it would be around the holidays, but my organization apparently slows it down by taking a half day off for Christmas. Also, I have finally decided to leave behind the roosters, roaches and general dismay of Chamelco and to get myself a shmancy apartment in Coban. I had convinced myself that I could hold out with the Chamelco room for the three months that we are supposed to live with families. However, the introduction of a caged rooster outside my door sealed the deal. That´s right, the damn chickens win. This must be karma. My history of fowl-related murderous activities are coming back to peck me in the ass. As such, the Dan vs. Chicken saga continues....(I´ll be back, just a minor defeat for the moment).

Gaining an exception to any rule here seems to require something like a perfect alignment of the planets, yet I somehow got one (Santa is real!). I had to stretch my Spanish to the limits to get my own apartment, but in the end I convinced my boss go along with it. So that is a relief. It will be great to be settled-in once and for all in my own spot. That leaves me next week to go through moving again. As for January, I have freak-out scheduled for the week prior to the start of classes. In mid-January, I begin teaching organic agriculture and science to hoards of 4th and 6th graders. Oh shit it right--I gotta figure out how to manage all that, any ideas?

So that´s the rap on Christmas and Coban. I´m busy and things have been somewhat unsettling lately. However, I´m beginning to see where things are headed and I like what I see. Talk to you all soon.

Two weeks at site and it´s been good. I´m not doing a whole lot at the moment it terms of work. Mostly, I´ve been hanging around the office to get to know everyone. However, I did spend one day planting an another working with the tea processing machines. Come next week, I will begin on some family garden projects.

At the moment, I´m renting an apartment in Chamelco, a small town about 15 minutes from Coban by bus and about 15 minutes on foot from the cooperative. My rational for living in Chamelco was that it was a nice small and quiet place where I could walk to work. However, the first two weeks have changed that image somewhat. For one, my room is right next to the Cathedral. Unlike most churches I´ve known, mass is celebrated here daily at 5AM with marimba music, bass and bells. Moreover, my backdoor is visited every morning by a particularly vocal rooster. I´ve gotten used to it by now, but the first few nights I spent awake in bed scheming about how I was going to kill the rooster. Had I not gotten used to him, I think a machete would have been involved in the solution.

Also, I started Q´echki classes this week in Coban. It´s pretty crazy to be starting from zero on a language. However, most of the old volunteers managed to get a handle on it. The instructor is great and I´m pretty excited to start speaking the language on the cooperative. It´s a great confidence builder. I should be fairly busy with language for the next couple months. Come mid-January, classes start and I´ll be busy with the schools.

Damn, training is over. Things are finally starting to sink in for me now as I`m starting my service. This last week was busy as hell and now all of a sudden, I´m in Coban, I start work on Monday and I still don´t have a house. It´s exciting and all, but it´s rather shocking to become comfortable after three months and to then start it all over again. Anyways, last week saw a host of events. Continuing with the chicken saga, last Saturday we slaughtered all 30 of our birds to cook for our family appreciation day party. We went out in Antigua that night and then swore in at the ambassador´s house on Monday morning before celebrating another night out. Needless to say, I haven´t been sleeping much. Wednesday, I spent a final day with my host family. When I told them that I was considering staying in Guatemala for my last night, the kids all starting crying, so I ended up staying there on Thursday evening. Thanksgiving itself was fun, but certainly not the same as KC. The vice-ambassador had us over to his house and treated us with a really good dinner. Yesterday morning we said our final goodbyes and took off for our sites. So now, I´m here in Coban and trying to get myself organized. I´m hoping to find a house by tomorrow, but there´s no big rush. Although I feel like I´ve been here for awhile, I frequently need to remind myself that my two years of service just began on Monday.

I´m back in Antigua today after visiting taking a site visit to Coban. I spent the time with some other volunteers looking for housing and meeting the folks on the cooperative. It looks like I have got plenty of work ahead of me. I´ll be working with families, women´s groups and two schools on the cooperative. Also, I´ll be teaching one or two days a week in an all-boys primary school in Coban. I spent all of yesterday looking for a house, but I can´t make up my mind. I think I will live in my site mate´s house till I find my own.

Prior to Coban, we had a pretty incredible weekend. On Saturday morning, the trainees played the Spanish teachers and tech trainers in soccer at the center. 10-2 was the final score. They made us look like fools. However, those two goals were both mine (a fact that many have told me to shut up about). Afterwards, we drove south to climb the Pacaya Volcano. Awesome. You start out at the base in the woods and walk up a couple miles to where the rock begins. From there, it´s a straight climb up the slate-rock cone of the volcano. It was really cloudy and rainy, so the view wasn´t much, but we were surrounded by the sulfur ducts. We even got up close to the lava at one point. I got completely soaked, but it was worth it and definitely something I would do again with anyone who visits.

On Sunday, we woke up bright and early and our tech trainer Roberto took us to Monterico with his family. It´s a small beach town down on the Southern Pacific Coast. There were great waves and I probably spent about 5 hours rolling around in them. It´s definitely a different side of Guatemala. It´s got black sands and unlike Antigua, it´s hot. So all and all, it made for a busy, but wonderful weekend before meeting our counterparts on Monday.

Training pretty much feels over. At this point, my thoughts are focused on life in Coban. It is
kind of weird to be so far away from all the friends I´ve made through training. Most everyone else in my groups has their sites on West and thus, very far from Coban. However, those living in the Coban area form their own community. So it will be something of an adjustment. We have two more weeks here at the center before we swear in. I´m having Thanksgiving with an embassy family in the capital (gonna miss KC) before taking off on the following Friday. From there, it´s all Coban.

Big events this week. We started by painting Antigua red on Halloween and yesterday we ate lunch with the new ambassador. However, all of that paled in comparison to our site assignments. I had placed my bet and mentally prepared myself get the remote, arid site out in the Western highlands. To my surprise, I got Coban (the site I secretly coveted). Needless to say, I am really pleased with how things turned out. For the event, our jefe came out to the center and drew a big map of Guatemala on the ground. We all closed our eyes and our teachers placed us on our respective sites. At the same moment, we all opened up and saw our placement and sitemates.

I am going to be working on the Chirrepec Tea Cooperative and I´ll have two sitemates from the ag. marketing program. Unfortunately, another volunteer who was supposed to be placed in Coban decided to go home. It´s a bummer as she was the most knowledgeablele of all the ag. volunteers (she regularly ¨field butchered¨livestock). Since her site will be left open, my boss asked me to pick up some of her work at a school in Coban. So with that, I´ll be working with families on the cooperative and teaching to 4th and 6th graders in the city. Also, I´ll have to start Kechki classes as most families on the cooperative do not speak much Spanish.

If two months ago you had told me I´d be living in a city, teaching 4th graders and working on a tea co-op speaking kechki, I would have laughed. I had imagined the Peace Corps experience in far more rugged and subdued terms. It´s amazing to think back to the beginning of training and to see the difference between my expectations and how things have turned out.

Anyways, I´m pumped about Coban and I´ll be going back on Monday to start getting things together. Perhaps I´ll visit the Children of the Corn....

Best week so far. We went on out second and last field-based training up North in Coban. We spent the week running around with two volunteers who are on their way out and are going to be replaced by two of us. Both are good volunteers, but more importantly, they´re actually sane. Both have learned to speak both Spanish and Kekchí­ and have had a lot of success with their communities. It was encouraging to spend the week with them.

Basically, we ran around with them all week and had some training activities. This included giving presentations to local groups in order to practice. I gave mine to a bunch of fourth-graders on how to use worms for composting. I had planned on giving it to adults, so I scraped my plans at the last minute just walked around and let them play with the worms. I think they liked it.

We also met with a family of Mennonite missionaries who are running a school in Coban. They run a large organic farm outside the school where we spent they day. They were hilarious. They´ve been their for four years and the whole family is tri-lingual, including the kids. What´s best is that they look like the Children of the Corn and live in totally indigenous community. On Thursday, we ended up going out to a nature preserve with them. There were a bunch of waterfalls and caves. We cooked-out and soaked it up. It was great to go swimming.

We also had meetings with the jefe to discuss our sites. After seeing the two Coban volunteers, I decided I´d really like to learn another language and requested a Mayan-language site. We find out this coming Thursday. At the moment, we know all the sites, but they have yet to be assigned. All we have to go on is hearsay and hunches, so we´re all pretty nervous to find out. Based on my requests, my guess is that I´ll either end up in Coban or way out West. I´m suspecting I´ll get the one out West. It sounds pretty rugged, but I´m up for that. However, in the past, people have gotten sites totally contrary to their requests, so I could end up somewhere else. We´ll see. Till then, we´re placing our bets.

Not a whole lot going on this week. Right now, we are in between our two field-based training trips. Basically, that means two weeks of training in the center until we leave a week from tomorrow for Coban. We still do not have much information about our sites. We should be getting our assignments the week after going to Coban.

We did spend some time this week working to rebuild from some of the damage of the hurricane. A couple of the villages around Antigua took some serious flooding that left a lot of houses and property buried. Our work was to help dig out what we could. In this area, help abounds as many tourists from Antigua have lent a hand. From what I have read, many of the communities in the western part of the country have it worse. As such, some of the sites our director had picked out may have to be changed.

While working, we met a bunch of other PC volunteers who had been stranded in Antigua and could not get back to their sites. Having met about six ag. Volunteers, I would characterize them on a scale from seemingly normal to utterly crazy. One year working out in the field seems to have a strange effect on some people--some far more than others. The three that stand out more than others are Sara, the 50 year old ex-hippie, Justin the misanthrope and Billy, the far too happy cowboy from Nebraska. I don´t have enough time to elaborate on their complexities, but let´s just say it offers an interesting insight into how we might be in a year.

So here it is, I started a blog.

I am a little over a month into training at the moment and I must say that Guatemala has been a great time. Although I spent most of last week stuck out west in Xela due to the Hurricane, everything has been an experience.


While most of Guatemala got nailed pretty hard by the storm, we managed to have a good time in the hotel. The rains caused landslides blocking the roads out of Xela, killed the power and broke all the water lines. We got by with rainwater and gas stoves. The storm made the trip a wash, but the nights of cards, politics and drinking made it a worthwhile time to really get to know the other trainees.

Beyond last week, training has been a good time. I landed a great host family that is the envy of everyone else. A couple weeks ago, I went along with them to their family finca down by the El Salvador border. The place was incredible. They grew about 25 different crops on a huge piece of land up in the mountains. It was a family plot with 3 houses, about 30 family members and four generations. There are no roads in and we had to walk a mile to arrive. It´s seriously a scene out of 100 Years of Solitude.

Beyond the travels, I have been fairly busy with training. I opted out of Spanish classes to focus more on technical training. So far, we´ve terraced some land, planted a bunch of vegetables and built a chicken coop. We finished the coop last week and bought about 115 chickens to raise and produce eggs. At the moment, we´ve got about 100 somewhat happy chicks, hens and roosters under one roof.

Unfortunately, of the 15 full grown birds we bought, some have gotten sick and we´ve had to cull them from the flock. When this whole ordeal began and the hens started getting sick, it was my job to kill them (I had mentioned my hunting experience before, so I got the job). My instructor told me to take the hen down past the avocado trees, do the deed and to then bury her. Instead, everyone else came to watch. I thought I could get by with the old ¨wounded duck¨move and just snap the neck without making much of a fuss. So I grabbed the hen by the feet and the head and pulled. Nothing happened, it just sat there and blinked at me. On a second and more concerted try, I gave the bird a harder pull and managed to tear the head right off. As there are three Dan´s in the ag program and we need to distinguish ourselves, I now sometimes find myself responding to Dan the Butcher. However, the other Dans find their names prefaced by Diarrhea and Delicate Peaches, so it could be worse.

So that´s the first month in a nutshell. I´ve got more training in the center for the next couple weeks before we go on another training trip to Coban. Hopefully, I learn some more about where my site will be.