Birthday

This week was my ‘US birthday’, meaning that when friends from the US read my birthday as month/day when I have written it day/month, they think I have a birthday in August. This oddity of dates has prompted me to finally write about my birthday in the village many months ago.

Birthdays are not a big deal in the PNG villages I've been in. Although a child’s health book will list their date of birth, most village kids do not know when their birthday is without checking what the book says. Many adults do not know the exact date of their birth at all. This is quite a contrast to Aussie kids who know exactly how old they are and count down the days until their next birthday. I’ve moved on from the countdown, but I still enjoy celebrating birthdays as I see them as an annual reminder to be thankful for the gift of life.

Spending my birthday in the village this year meant that it was a quiet day, and much like any other village day. I had one gift, as I’d pre-arranged for my parents to send a parcel to me with a YWAM friend a few weeks earlier. Even now that I’ve lived out of home as long as I lived at home, it is still fun to have a parcel on my birthday. It was also fun to eat all of the chocolates in the box over the next day or two, rather than carefully rationing them as I usually do with village supplies.

The best gift was not wrapped, but was the enthusiasm of one of the Kope translators for the work we are doing. In conversation I had been emphasising that this is their translation programme, not mine, and that I am there to equip, train and support them in their work, but that they need to take ownership of what we are doing. Well, this message must have sunk in, as in our conversation this translator had clearly taken ownership and was enthusiastic about the next steps of translation and how to engage the community.

No translation happened on my birthday, due to the translation team having other commitments. Instead, I spent the day thinking of the monks of old as I hand-wrote two chapters of the Bible. I’m yet to buy a printer for the village, so hand copying was the only way to get the good copy that I needed. The temptation to stop writing and do some colouring in gave me a cheeky insight into one possibility of how illuminated manuscripts happened: bored monks with some creativity to let loose.

My birthday in the village may have been a quiet affair, but I was (and am) thankful for the gift of another year of life, for the Kope community around me, for the enthusiasm of the translators …and for chocolate.