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Friends-

Feliz Navidad! It’s hard to believe that Christmas is almost upon us and I wanted to take this chance to write and give you a little update on Christmas here on the Caribbean.

Tonight we had the 5th night of our traditional posadas. Posadas are a Central American tradition that recalls the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. Each night the whole finca gathers and sings Christmas carols going to three houses. Two of our little kids dress up as Mary and Joseph and they ask for refuge at the houses. At the first two they are turned away. At the third they are given refuge and we enter to sing and pray and read a part of the Christmas story. It is fun, interesting, totally geared to the kids and really gets you prepared for Christmas. Tonight it also really sunk in that for so many of our children this is their story. It is a story of being turned away or finding no safe place to rest their head and in the end finding refuge here.

The more I get to know and love these children the more I feel blessed to be here to welcome them into my heart. In the hopes that they can find refuge in your heart too, I want to tell you about a few of them. Nelly is in 2nd grade. She has a twin sister (Brenda), older brother (Jose, better known as Nain) who will be in my 6th grade class next year, and two older sisters (Enma and Issa, also twins) who live in our teen girls house in town. After two months I’m convinced that Nelly and Brenda run the finca. Brenda is the intense one and Nelly is the wild fun loving one. The first week we were here she cut her bangs off so that her hair was all spikey in front. Unfortunately she did it during class and without permission (I think it looks really cool).

Nelly got a gift for her birthday of 100 lempiras ($5) with which she wanted to buy a pony. Even in Honduras a pony is more than $5 so after much discussion she ended up buying a baby pig (which is being raised by a friend of the finca) as an investment in the hopes of someday making enough money to buy a pony. Seriously, what kid doesn’t want a pony? When I think of our children these are the stories I think of. I try not to think of our orientation when we went case by case through the histories of our children and learned just how wounded they are. Every day we see the lasting effects of neglect and are haunted by the physical and sexual abuse that has been inflicted on children whose only desire is to be loved. So we love them. We work hard to provide a place for them to grow and learn and be children.

It’s very interesting working and living at the same place. All of the volunteers (and nuns and house parents) are super-committed and the boundaries between work and home fall very easily. Our meals together often turn into meetings and it’s hard to resist the temptation to schedule something after dinner when things get really busy (the best I’ve seen so far was a 4am meeting). Erika and I actually overlap very little in our jobs so we’ve done a decent job of separating home and work and are continually working to make sure we carve out time that is just for us.

The update on Michael is that he’s getting ready to celebrate his 2nd birthday on January 15th. He’s pretty incredible and just getting cuter. He’s talking so much (in English and in Spanish) and so into everything that is going on around him. He loves to play soccer and constantly wants to play with the big kids. He knows almost everyone on the finca by name (not bad since including everyone there are over 60 people). His favorite game is ?ride car? where he pretends to drive the car. He’s got the honking of the horn down and since he always watches me drive the landcruiser into town and talk on our marine radio his newest addition is where he calls on the radio, ?Finca del Nino, Finca del Nino this is Finca mobile?. Since he only gets to go to town on Sundays for mass, riding in the car is a big treat.

In November we also celebrated Thanksgiving. We pushed aside the soccer for a day to play football and served a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for over 45 friends and guests. We had visitors bring down ingredients we couldn´t get here and drove three hours away to get the 5 (5!) turkeys which were delicious. Sweet potatoes, apple pie, stuffing and all the trappings of thanksgiving including the leftovers.

At the moment we´re gearing up for Christmas. We put on a big celebration for the whole community on Christmas Eve. We have a communion service, dinner together, and then the kids put on a Christmas play that goes late into the night. Christmas day is a really low key time for us to recover, go into town to call home and have dinner together. We´re looking forward to it.

For those of you in the cold of up north our sympathies are with you. It’s rainy season here so our lows are dipping down to 70 degrees and with the chill in the air I’m sleeping in flannel pajamas. Fortunately it’s still plenty warm during the day to swim in the ocean so worry not. It hasn’t rained too much, though we’re starting to get in on a more regular basis. We got one good storm in the beginning of November that washed a tree across our riving crossing and trapped us on the finca for a day before the river fell enough for us to move it. The rain makes things interesting and is a nice break from the heat, though the cold showers are brutal this time of year.

I’m going to San Pedro Monday to meet another vols parents at the airport. She’s our nurse and has to be in the clinic that day so I offered to do the bus ride (6 hours each way) to meet them since they weren’t comfortable traveling on their own. It’s also good practice since Erika’s parents are taking the same flight when they come to visit the beginning of January. We’re excited for their visit especially since they will be here for Michael´s birthday and also excited that my mom will be coming to visit in March for Easter. We love having visitors if your interested in seeing this place for yourself.

Speaking of seeing the place, I’m having a few problems with the web site so I don’t have many new photos up. The logistics of doing this from down here are just tough so I hope you’ll bear with us. I’ll attach a few photos to this email to give you a taste and hopefully the website will be healed sometime in the near future.

Of course more than anything else I want to thank you for your continued support of us and our work down here. Not only have you supported us but just by word of mouth more and more people are hearing about the farm. We’re also currently recruiting pretty hard for our next volunteer class. Applications are due January 15th (www.farmofthechild.org) so if you know of anyone who might be interested pass the word on.

Thank you again for every prayer and know that we are thinking of you in this time of Advent.

Merry Christmas,

Michael-John, Erika and Michael

P.S. The attached photos are of Pepe and Gisele (aka Mary and Joseph) and of course Michael in his pajamas for our cold winter nights.