27: Meet the Mama' (old man)

Follies in Belizean Style Birthdays

We decided to have a traditional Belizean birthday for Greg this year. We invited our extended host family to dinner (Greg's favorite...spaghetti) at 6:00. We have gone to enough birthdays to attempt a reenactment. You go over, hand your gift, eat, tell stories, then the men drink rum with coconut water. Lynette and Margarita helped me set up the house with their tables and stools and brought over a bin of dishes and forks since we have only 4 of each.

Everyone filed in and Greg was handed his gifts. He said it was hard not to open them right away, he was a good Maya and put them under the tree without peeping. No one opens gifts in front of people and you don't ever talk about the gifts you got.

I served everyone their bowl of spaghetti and the hilarity began. Morpheus (the 5 year old) didn't resurface until his bowl was empty. This, however, was sadly not the norm. It was like a dungeon scene from a movie where the prisoners were given gruel and forced to eat it. Mrs. Cecilia would spend copious amounts of time separating just two tiny pieces of noodle. You could see during her hesitation, face twisted in dread, that she was psyching herself up to eat the repulsive food. They all ate it even with me insisting that they didn't need to eat it if they didn't like it. Jr. just walked up to me and said, "Thanks keveen, but I can't eat this. I don't like it." It was fine though we were all joking about how hilarious it was. Keith was tearing through his bowl but he admitted it was because one day he wanted to go to the states and if he couldn't eat it, he would starve. In all, Fermin, Andres, Morpheus, and Armin were the only ones to like the spaghetti.

Armin...LIKING the spaghetti!

After dinner Ofelia and Vera washed the dishes for me as I dished out more coffee. We put Fermin's memory card in the computer and watched a slide show of his pictures and videos. INCLUDING Amy dancing the traditional harp dance with some of her villagers at their garden graduation. After that Santiago asked Greg to tell some stories to entertain us. After story hour Greg passed out the rum and the guys chopped some coconuts and the men sipped rum as we watched an episode of Glee. What a 'mash-up' of traditions it was.

Ofelia brought this amount of cake. As of today (10 days later) we are still eating it!

After everyone left (around 9:30) we had our little birthday song and Greg opened his gifts. A planting cuxtal of his very own and new boxers!

The birthday celebrations continued on Monday (his actual birthday) where his best friend George, who works at his school, invited us for a birthday lunch. I came in the morning and did two writing model lessons and then we piled in their truck with their 7 kids to have a delicious lunch with potato salad, and fresh lime juice. They all sang happy birthday to Greg, it was a great birthday week.

His birthday luck was strong...behold his new drums from 3rd place in a raffle!

Keith and Brendon with their new, our old, laptop!

Holiday hours at the library...making book marks after story time!