Wow. It's 11 months to the day that I arrived in Mozambique - and my birthday. What a birthday it was, too.
People really expect you to tell them a week ahead of time that your day is coming up, because they love to prepare and make it special - students and neighbors mostly. People were asking me all day why I didn't announce it - but coming from an American perspective, it just isn't something I would go around announcing. I suppose it's something to look forward to next year.
So anyway, Dinho, Violeta, Jurcia, Albertino, Jorgito, Charles, Annie and Blake got together and baked cakes and took pictures of us eating them. We drank filtered water and listened to the same CDs, talking and laughing about the same stuff, sitting in a room much too small and cluttered. In other words, fantastic. It really felt like family, yelling at Dinho to stop messing around with the music and listening to Jorgito's half-rehearsed, half-improvised birthday song for snare drum (played on a large book with chopsticks).
And in school, I was sung to endlessly, asked tons of questions like, "Are you married?", "Do you have kids?", "How long did you study?", "Where in the US are you from?", "How old are you now?", and in one class, even lifted up by about 10 boys, threatening to carry me out and about school. I managed to get down before being carried out the door, and trying to explain to other teachers that, well, they were just having fun.
I wore my tux almost all day, to mark the occasion, and though everyone laughed, it was a good laugh. They've never seen me so dressed up. I got calls from half a kilometer away by students who could tell today's dress was a little different.
But, as Charles pointed out, you miss home in a different way on your birthday. There's a certain comfort in the way your friends and family celebrate it - even when one of your friends completely forgets (and I count myself in that group), the way you recover is completely different. And maybe you don't get lifted up by a dozen teenagers every time, but being able to reminisce about "last year" is worth its weight in gold.
Still a great day!
Peace
John
