A Very Merry Unbirthday to Me

My 26^th birthday was February 11^th, which was last Wednesday, unless you happen to be reading this more than a week after that time, in which case, you’ll have to figure out for yourself how long ago that was.

This was also the first time I’ve ever celebrated my birthday outside of the US or without members of my cultural family (ie, Americans). Consequently, this is a perfect opportunity for me to hit you with a little cross-cultural truth about how Moroccans do birthdays.

But I’ll start with how things went down from home. First, I got a few letters and packages from home, and I believe that there may be a few more on the way, that were filled with wonderful items. There are three things that I hope for when opening a box from home. The first is food, of which my older brother and his wife did an excellent job of coming through on. I now have my own bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce, as well as an assortment of hot chocolate mixes and boxes of macaroni and cheese, and I had some Pepperidge Farm cookies and gummy bears for at least a short while after opening the box. The second thing is warm clothing. I didn’t get any of these things, though the weather is starting to get much nicer here in Freedonia, and I think I almost don’t have bone-itis anymore. The last thing I hope for is random nonsense, most perfectly exemplified by the pirate-launching catapult my mother sent, which is impossible to describe, so let’s just say that it’s not at all like what you’re imagining, unless you’ve seen them before. You just can’t get that around here. She also sent a travel book for Tunisia because we’re going to go there in the summer.

The absolute best, however, was a photograph with a poem written on the back from Salma, which had been sitting on my table waiting to be opened for a few days, and was the first thing I did for my birthday.

The second thing I did was to answer the phone and receive the most unexpected of all my birthday “presents:” a phone call from the main Peace Corps office in Rabat. It was short and sweet, but because it was so out of the blue, it really made me feel special on my birthday, so kudos to the person who started that tradition.

As for the Moroccan side, two of the guys I work with gave me presents, both cute and meaningful Moroccan souvenir decorations. One is a little teapot, the second most iconic object for all Morocco (after a loaf of bread, of course), and the other is one of those things that you use to blow air into a fire – I don’t know what they’re called – that has Arabic calligraphy and Moroccan designs stamped into the metal. I also went over to my homestay family’s house and ate lunch, though I might have done that anyway, and we celebrated my birthday like real Moroccans, which is to say, we didn’t do anything about it at all.

Yes, I’m afraid to tell you that birthdays just aren’t really a thing over here. In fact, I know a handful of people who don’t even really know when their birthday is. For example, it was my host brother’s birthday on January 29^th, and on February 2^nd I asked him what he had done for it. His response? “Oh, my birthday was yesterday, wasn’t it?” No, it wasn’t, and it goes to show you that birthdays pass fairly often without any notice. Sometimes people will make a little cake, or at least get some pastry from the store. I think my host mom had been thinking of doing this for me, but then (according to what she told me later), she went to visit some woman and forgot all about it.

For the most part, if someone knows it’s your birthday, they’re liable to say happy birthday to you, and then just carry on as they had been before. In fact, people generally talk about their age as being relative to the year that it is and what age they will be after their birthday this year, not according to whether that day has passed yet or not like we do. For example, we do a summer camp as youth development volunteers, and we can send students to the camp who are between the ages of 14 and 16, but this means we need to ask them what year they were born in, not simply how old they are. This can be very tricky to deal with and confusing, but it’s starting to get me away from my point about what I did for my birthday.

The answer? Mostly nothing. In many ways, it was just another day. But, thanks to the support of the people back home, as well as other volunteers here who sent me text messages all day, I still felt celebrated. And I used the occassion as a justification to take a shower, which felt great.