Birthday in Nicaragua!

January 29, 2010

My last week has been pretty blog-worthy, starting with my birthday.

I woke up and walked out of my room to find that one of my relatives, knowing how much I love spinach (and how rare it is to find in Nicaragua), had seen some on the side of the road, picked it, and brought the leaves and seeds to my house for me! I was like “what a great birthday present!”, and my family was collectively like “It’s your birthday?!?!? Oh my gosh, happy birthday!” I went back to my room to try to plan for my community class later that day, and an hour or so later, got asked to come out by one of my many aunts. As soon as I stepped into the family room, my family collectively screamed “SURPRISE! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” at me while throwing confetti at me and popping balloons and presenting me with a star-shaped cake and singing three songs in succession to me: “Cumpleaños a Tí,” which is the English Happy Birthday song in Spanish; “Las Mañanitas,” a traditional Mexican happy birthday song that I sang every time anyone in my Spanish class had a birthday for the last two years of high school; and “Queremos Pastel,” which is sung to the tune of “Happy Birthday to You,” but translates to “We want cake, we want cake, although it might be just a little, we want cake!” It was pretty fantastic. I don’t think I’ve ever been serenaded with quite that much fervor before, except maybe on my way to the bathroom in Montreal on my 21st birthday, when an entire restaurant full of my friends sang to me.

I mentioned my community class somewhere back in that paragraph; that ended up being another great birthday gift that day. I biked out to El Carbón expecting perhaps no one to actually show up, with Micah being in Estelí to attend a training for his Ag group; instead twice as many people showed up as had the week before. I was beside myself as I saw a veritable flock of people coming down the road toward the school, and I was like “… They’re, they’re all carrying notebooks! They’re coming to my class!” And so, we squeezed 20 or so people onto a little porch, where we reviewed greetings and goodbyes, learned the alphabet (as a call and response, as opposed to the ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ version), numbers 1-10 (which were counted down to simulate a rocket taking off and a ball dropping on New Year’s), and sang the chorus of the Jackson 5’s “A-B-C,” (as in “A-B-C, it’s easy as 1-2-3, as simple as Do-Re-Mi, A-B-C, 1-2-3 baby you and me, girl!) all of which was incredibly fun for me, and seemed to be fun for everyone else too.

Also deserving mention are all the people who called me or texted me, those being my friends Lindsey, Liz, and Donna, along with Kim and my parents. It made my day to hear from you all! I appreciated the facebook messages from far-flung friends as well, but calling is definitely a step above. I got no mail nor packages that day, but knowing that some are on the way made that ok.