I feel I owe you all an immediate description of my actual birthday festivities given the overwhelming amount of love I've been receiving via mail (which has all the other volunteers extremely jealous by the way :-D). The birthday tradition here at Casa San Salvador is to toss the birthday person in as many bodies of water as possible. I approached my birthday therefore with a bit of trepidation and pre-planning. My girls, through various conversations during my time here, knew very well when my birthday was and so Monday was spent receiving threats of forced fountain baths to happen the next day. Wesleigh helped guarantee that my girls remembered the importance of the day by greeting me first thing while surrounded by my girls with "Happy Birthday" which my girls responded to with evil smiles. During desayuno (at 6:30am) I negotiated my way out of an early dunking by arguing it was too cold and almuerzo passed uneventfully because of the short time span they had before returning to school.
I purposely delayed changing into my white playera for the day knowing what was coming and I began to feel the nerves during comida. I kept catching furtive glances my way and hidden conversations behind hands. As we were leaving the comedor, a few of my girls subtly (yeah right) detoured me to wait in the patio before heading back to the section. As I humored them with forced small talk I was surprised from behind by Lupita with the hose and so had my first soaking of the day. They then escorted me to the room, but the girls there weren't ready yet so I was walked away from the section before being attacked once again from behind. Three girls, each with their own bucket full of water, attacked at that point. Paloma was walking with me providing the diversion part of the job and was therefore decently drenched herself. Her yells of "It's not my birthday!" did nothing to help redirect the bucket throws. :-P
I wanted to change after this episode thinking it was over, but some of my girls jokingly said there was more to come. Not wanting to risk it, I sat outside the room for about an hour in my soaking clothes shivering slightly and helping those who were brave enough to risk my puddle with homework. Finally I decided it was time and changed into my white playera and khaki shorts. The rest of the afternoon was uneventful until after English class when Monika (the volunteer) pushed me in the pool. I felt so stupid when it happened because with anyone else I would have been suspicious, but we were just walking together chatting and she sort of aimed me in that direction where Dan was swimming laps so I thought we were going to say hi or something and suddenly I'm in the pool. I changed again and headed to dinner. (I had just done laundry Monday, but the clothes line was starting to look like I'd had to do it all over again.)
After dinner, while the girls were saying their prayers I closed my eyes briefly on the couch (I was pretty tired) when suddenly I was startled back into reality by a circle of my girls singing Las Mananitas, the traditional birthday song here. It's really beautiful and a lot more involved than our birthday song. It was the first time I had heard it all the way through and I was really moved that they sang it for me. The birthday celebration didn't end there either!
Once I got back to volunteer central, we had pizza from a great local place and my strawberry birthday cake complete with candles (thanks Mom!). Wesleigh had really gone all out and had spent several hours trying to figure out how to bake the cake with our limited supplies here as well as organize the food with the others. I received several very sweet notes from them and even a sleeve of Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies from Andrew (a true prize given his limited supply). All in all, I felt truly loved all day long and had a great birthday. The overwhelming love and support from you all at home really put things over the top. I don't think I have enough space in my room for all these beautiful cards and notes of support! Thank you everyone, once again, for making this birthday so special! You have no idea how much it means to me.
