A very happy unbirthday!!!

I am so excited to share with you all parts of an email from my dear friend Kez (surprise Kez, I'm mentioning you again, haha)!! I've shared with you all how much I adored the children of HFC and NLL when I got to spend time with them. Some of the greatest days of my life spent with some of the greatest people I've ever met. One of them is Kez. She is a missionary that has been living at the orphanage for a while now and has been such a huge blessing to me personally and a total blessing to the kids that live there. The kids all love her so much. Kez's time at HFC will be ending next month and she will return to her life in Boston. Her birthday is not until August but the kids wanted to throw her a birthday party so they did it this weekend. I hope sharing this letter will allow you to see why I love these kids so much. Also, there is no one that deserves this kind of love more then Kez so I'm thrilled they showered her with it this way! Here is parts of her email about her birthday weekend that I'm sure she will never forget:

On Friday, the girls kicked me out of my room at 4pm. They took me into the guest room and Youdemie and your Stephanie started giving me a pedicure, while Jeanine did my hair, and two others did my manicure. I have never had a pedicure or a manicure before, and I have to say, I may never have another one. The foot-washing part and the nail painting part were fine, but when they started scrapping my feet with a metal grater…I don’t have sneakers because I gave them to one of the kids, so whenever we play sports, I play barefoot. My feet are all calloused and beat up sothey didn’t do so well with the pedicure. But thegirls were just so sweet and so eager to do it for me, how could I not be pleased?

When my spa was over at 6pm, the girls made me dress up and then they locked me in my kitchen. Half an hour later, Kattia and Youdemie came to escort me downstairs. As I walked into the downstairs hallway,I heard one of my favorite Mariah Carey songs start playing. We kept going down the hall, turned the corner, and I almost burst into tears. The courtyard was transformed with balloons and ribbons and streamers and floodlights and an entire sound system. All the kids were standing on the ground or on chairs, waving glow-in-the-dark sticks, cheering, and welcoming me to my own birthday party. They led me to a decorated chair in the middle of the front row, and then the program started.

The first presentation was a “defile” (a model catwalk) by the New Life Link toddlers and kindergarteners. I had known that the toddlers were working on something but everyone told me it was for their graduation in June. They were so adorable, especially James and Mansanto! I was laughing and all the kids were cheering and clapping like crazy. After them, we had a series of songs by the girls, and then the dancing started. Again, I had known that the kids were preparing a dance, but I didn’t realize that actually they were preparing 5 dances, a rap, and another defile! The dances were amazing, especiallythe ones with the boys. You should see Emmanuel dance! And the defile – oh, my gosh! I knew that Debbie loved to sew so about a month ago, I gave her awhole bunch of cloth that Meg had left with me to use for projects. Well, she and a few other girls used that cloth to make 10 beautiful outfits for the models. I was blown away! The older girls cut and distributed cake, gave out candy and sugar cane. Finally, they made me come up and make a speech. At the end of the speech, Stephanie, Jude and a few other kids crept up behind me and threw handfuls of confetti on me (remember Jacques was cutting up pieces of orange paper for Keziah’s party? Yeah, all down my shirt and in my hair and in my mouth and in my ears). Then they brought me into the mess hall to do the ceremonial cutting of my personal cake, which of course ended in me smearing cake on the faces of all the girls. Good times.

I got escorted upstairs, where the girls put me in a chair and carried me into my room. They had decorated my room with blue and white balloons, paper pinwheels, paper chains, more confetti, some Happy Birthday posters, and lots of glow-in-the-dark splatters on the wall, the furniture and the girls themselves. It looked like they had transformed my room into a starry night sky. Again, overwhelming. They gave me a few small gifts and my 21 birthday spankings, plus one huge one to grow on. And then they left me to rave to Kim about how amazing they all are and how much I am going to miss them when I leave.

Back at the orphanage, the girls came up to my room and told me I needed to come down and film the food that was being served for lunch. I was utterly confused by that. We eat the exact same thing every Sunday for lunch; why did I need to film it? But you can’t argue with the girls, so I took my camera and went down and was speechless, again. Apparently, this was part two of my birthday celebration. They had made huge bowls of rice and elaborately decorated them with onions and tomatoes and lettuce. There was chicken, sauce, macaroni salad, beet/potato salad, 2 kinds of juice, and 5 huge cakes that said “HappyBirthday, Keziah!” Dr. Bernard and Claudette came and we brought the boys over so that everyone could eat together. Dr Bernard delivered to me the suitcase of clothes and school supplies that my Sunday schoolclass back in Boston had sent for us, so the birthday girl got to give party favors: t-shirts, shorts, dresses, pens, pencils, markers, and paper for all 60kids.

Finally, the weekend ended with the girls giving me a bunch of birthday cards and us watching clips that I filmed from the party.

(I keep telling my husband that the one I REALLY want to adopt is Kez and he gently reminds me that she's an adult and has a family and I can't adopt her! Mwen renmen ou, se'm! -- I love you my sister! I'm so glad you were blessed with such an amazing unbirthday, Love, Angela)