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.