PROJECT BIRTHDAY

The longer that I am here the more needs I become aware of. I have been trying to come up with things that I could do for the kids to make them feel special. With over 400 children here, it's impossible for the staff to minister to them one-on-one and to do special things for them – there's not enough time or hands to do it. But I am not staff and therefore I have a little bit more time and flexibility to do things. So I've decided that I want to do a birthday calendar for all the kids. I want to post it on a wall in the girl volunteer house so that after I leave hopefully someone else will keep going with it. I want to make a lot of birthday cards and so that when it is a kid's birthday I can find them, hand them a card, give them a hug and say, "Feliz Cumpleanos!"

I seriously doubt that anyone reading this does not know how old they are or when their birthday is. We tend to think that everyone knows when their birthday is and of course kids especially keep up with how old they are. Yet this is common here. As I started gathering the information to make a birthday calendar, I realized that many children did not have a birthday listed and some just had "About 1995" written. I was sitting watching some of the medium boys play soccer the other day while working on the birthday calendar and of course they were curious as to what I was working on. When I explained to them what I was trying to do, they all wanted to know when their birthday was and how old they were. Of course there are some children who have a birthday and know exactly how old they are…but many do not. I asked one little boy Johnny how old he was and he said 9, but his birthday was listed and he's actually 12. It may be hard for you to believe that a kid could be so far off on their own age, but think about it… Many of these children were rescued out of extreme poverty and/or abuse, which has made quite an impact on their growth and development. Often the kids look at least 3-5 years younger than they really are.

My first goal is to find out when everyone's birthday is or let them make up one if they don't have one by the end of this month. It's been pretty fun to sit down with a calendar and let them pick a birthday. Most of them want to choose the following day  With my other responsibilities I'm not able to work on this as much as I'd like to, but my goal is to have the calendar made by the beginning of November and have all the birthday cards made by the end of the year so that at the start of next year we'll be set and ready to go! We'll be celebrating over 450 birthdays next year!