happy barfday

I really need to get into a habit of blogging at regular intervals rather than going on blog binge and purge cycles like I have been doing. At any rate, as promised in my previous post, here is a story.
I was not quite sure what to expect for my first international birthday, so I appropriately placed my expectations quite low. My birthday fell on a Sunday, and this particular Sunday I was out of Kandy visiting another church in Kurunegala, an hour and a bit away. I went to see some ancient ruins with a bunch of men from the church on a day trip on Saturday (Sri Lanka's history is fascinating, if you are bored some day you should google Polonnarawu or Anuradhapura, two of the ancient capital cities) which is a much longer story than I am willing to relay right now. We got back late Saturday night and I pretty much went to bed straight away. Somehow my Kurunegala hosts found out it was my birthday, and I woke up for breakfast Sunday morning to find my place set with a gift, quite lovely. My hosts also made sure that they slipped the pastor a note during the service so he was aware it was my birthday. So, I was asked up to the front to receive a rousing, international flavored rendition of "Huppy Birt-day."
When I returned to Kandy Monday morning I found that there were several youth from the church who had also learned of my day of birth and were dissapointed that I was not around for them to receive gifts(apparently, the birthday boy or girl is the giver of gifts in Sri Lanka)! So when they showed up that night for youth church, I was prepared with a canadian style birthday cake to feed the well-wishers.
There were about nine youth who came, including the six year old sister of one of the boys. This precious little girl kept coming in and out of the group all night, whimpering and wanting to be held by her brother and I wondered what her problem could be and why she wasn't hanging out downstairs with her grandma as she usually does. No problem, the meeting went on.
We finished the meeting and all paraded downstairs for some delectable dessert at the expense of the birthday boy. Before we dug in, I was again regaled with another presentation of "Huppy Birt-day." However, this performance had a little extra flavor than the previous version, compliments of the sweet small one who kept interrupting the youth group. She decided to make known to all of us why she had been whimpering and whining the whole evening. As the voices joined together in a harmonious gusto down the home stretch: "...Huppy Birt-daaaaay tooooo.....VOMIT!" I was standing close enough to my little friend that I felt several projectiles of puke spatter on my leg before I actually knew what had happened. The funny thing is that no one even broke concentration, flawlessly carrying on, "...tooo...yooouuuuuuu!"

She felt much better after she upchucked all over the dining room floor. I had a great laugh. We all enjoyed cake. Everybody wins.