Bring on the parties

After a long November of hurricane after hurricane, non-stop depression-inducing rain and a few more bouts with Honduran illnesses, at last it is December. The month of celebration. Of Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and my birthday. Bring it on.

The first party of the month was yesterday, though it was somewhat unexpected. Since Thanksgiving, I have been planning a joint birthday party with Ely, one of my best volunteer friends who lives a 3-hour bus ride away from me. Our birthdays are within 10 days of each other and for three weeks we have been discussing amongst ourselves a full day of celebration, starting with a day hike and ending with a dinner party. Since Salsa Dave from the south is planning to visit me next weekend, we tentatively planned the party to be in Olanchito on the 17th.

It turns out that our north coast friend Michael was organizing faster than us. Last Saturday, he announced a surprise birthday lunch for Ely at a seafood restaurant near La Ceiba on the 10th. Not telling Ely about this arrangement, I continued to plan our joint party with him and finally sent out our email invitation to other volunteers late this week.

Late yesterday morning, my sitemate Lauren and I left O’chito on the bus for what should have been a less-than-two-hour ride to Sambo Creek, a Garífuna (a distinct Honduran ethnic group with a strong African heritage) town on the Atlantic coast where the restaurant is located. Of course the ride was longer, maybe because of the Christmas-time Telethón volunteers standing in the middle of the road every dozen miles and stopping passing traffic to collect money for charity. The bus ayudante was particularly obnoxious, too, spending an inordinate amount of time not collecting bus fare, as is his job, but rather standing behind Lauren’s seat trying to get a glimpse down her shirt. In any case, it was nice to have her company since I almost always take the bus alone. She lent me one earphone of her Ipod and we discussed music all the way up to Sambo Creek.

When we finally slipped past the salivating ayudante and off the bus, we walked about a mile down the main cobblestone and cement road through Sambo Creek to the restaurant, greeting the relaxed gazes of the dark-skinned Garífuna women in colored head wraps sitting on their front porches with “Buenos días” as we passed, and ignoring the teenage boys who too obviously wanted our attention. When I spent a night in the Cayos Cochinos at the beginning of October, I was given the unusual privilege of being taught some of the Garífuna language by the islands´ residents, including “Bwiti binafi,” which is equivalent to the Spanish greeting we were using in Sambo Creek. I was too shy to use it at that moment, though, because it was already afternoon and I wasn’t quite sure if it is only a morning greeting. The Garífuna are open, friendly people but are also well-known for guarding their culture and language proudly, and well, the only reaction I would have wanted from the porch-sitting women would have been “That gringa can speak Garífuna!” rather than “That gringa can’t even speak Garífuna!”

I noticed the breaking of ocean waves before I noticed that we had arrived at the restaurant, which was perched on pilings one storey above the sand that suddenly spread itself not 20 meters from our feet. Lauren and I walked up the stairs to find four other north coast volunteers already enjoying fresh lemonade together. After the requisite round of hugs, I immediately gravitated toward the view. I saw pelicans soaring and diving, soaring and diving over the sea. Like elephants, their movements were unexpectedly effortless and graceful for being so awkward-looking. I saw long battered canoes pulled up on the shore, and Garífuna men arriving and leaving in more of the same. At a distance over the smooth blue water, I saw the Cayos Cochinos that I visited back in October, Cayo Menor’s lower peak superimposed on the hulk of Cayo Mayor. I strained to see the tiny white-sand islets that I know only host clusters of man-planted coconut palms, but my eyes couldn’t reach them.

More volunteers and expat friends arrived until there were about fifteen of us. Michael finally showed up with Ely and we all sang “Happy Birthday” upon his entrance. (He was surprised.) It turned out that the party was for me, too, and everyone sang once again when Ely and I blew out our respective candles on our respective cakes, which were actually two small round pans of different-flavored brownies made from American (i.e. good) boxed mixes that had arrived in someone’s care package from home. We all ate lime-cilantro ceviche, king crab with claws as big as my hand, garlic shrimp, immense bowls of seafood soup.

Maybe it would be trite to say that my first birthday in Honduras was spent sipping a cocktail and slurping conch-coconut milk soup, surrounded by friends at a restaurant overlooking the Caribbean Sea. But that’s how it was. Beautiful.