A Beautiful Moment

Today was my host mom's birthday. Señora Maximiliana is the hardest working woman I have ever seen. She wakes up with our new rooster.

Ok a short side note. My host family acquired chickens over the holidays. Let's just say I want to have a word with whoever gifted these fuckers. A couple pirated DVDs wouldn't suffice? A pannetone? Nope, apparently chickens were what we needed. Eggs are cheap and plentiful in town, and I don't even think my host family wanted chickens. But here we are w/ one male one female. Well the macho is hitting puberty—and just like all guys go through—his voice is cracking. Unfortunately, my room is right off the “coup”--patio, and Mr. Awkward Change Phase starts singing at 5:50, goes for a few notes, gives up, tries again in a few minutes. I've started to accustom to the “song” so that I can incorporate it into my dreams. Somehow, I had a dream where I blamed it on dad—go for it and analyze it if you want.

Anyway—enough about chickens. The point is my host mom gets up early. So today was her birthday. I had my newly formed youth group over for the afternoon—soon to be trained as Youth Health Promoters!--The name of the group is JUMP (Jovenes Unidos Motivados para el Progreso). The JUMPers were over to learn how to cook applesauce (they wanna keep learning to cook, and I'm running out of recipes...so far, french toast, pancakes, and applesauce...help?).

I told all the kids that it was my host mom's birthday. I figured I'd have to prod them to wish her a happy birthday—they are after all teenagers. Then as I went into the kitchen, I noticed them each, one by one, wishing my host mom a feliz cumpleaños and giving her a traditional cheek kiss. Sometimes you just have to sit back and enjoy what life can mean.

After the group made our applesauce, I headed to Huaraz for my own birthday traditions. My real mom had sent some gifts down about a week earlier, and the Peruvian mail system got them to me right on time :). Listo. As anyone who really knows me well, they know I like to shove 3 day's activities into one. So naturally I was running late, finally headed to the cake shop at about 8:00 p.m.--got the cake, then took my combí ride back to Jangas. I think it'll be a competition with myself to see how much shit I can take on one combí trip during my two years—after you see 15 guinea pigs in a bag on top of a combí, you really start respecting people's packing abilities...

So naturally I got back at 8:30, and my host parents were just heading to bed... oops. I talked to my host brother Eladio to double check this fact—he said, yeah, it'll just have to be a surprise. I said, yup, but he was gonna wake them... So there we sat at 8:45, eating our cake, and having our soy milk too. Thanks real mom for sending down the beautiful scarf, Señora Maxi loved it :). It was definitely a memorable night, and a night where I reminded myself of how much I really enjoy living with my host family, despite it sometime being challenging.

So here I sit at 9:41 p.m., about 7 hours away from the rooster's call (maybe for my host brother's birthday I'll suggest a chicken dinner). After you wake up, you never know where, what and with whom you'll your day will bring you.

Photo Credit: Some Vacaciones Utiles with 4 year olds.