My Birthday at the Community Center

 Some of you might know that I had my 25th birthday in Jamaica! It was the first birthday I've ever spent away from home and even though I missed being home for it, I had a fantastic birthday!

We started by getting up early to watch the sun rise. The whole community is on a hill so we hiked a little up to the top of the hill to get to a really awesome view!

Remember those kids from Canada I talked a little about earlier? They were doing a lot of work on the community center and at the deaf school that day so we decided to stick around and help out instead of doing home visits. Here's what the Community center looked like before. 

The Project run down: Take out the bungaloos, build an overhang, install a gutter to catch the rain water, pour a concrete patio, clear out the weeds to prepare for a new basketball court.

On our way down to the community center. Ready to Go!

This is where the new basketball court is going to be. Also a good picture of the view from the back of the community center. Then people can sit in the shade and watch the cricket, soccer, and basketball!

I helped install the gutter

We also sorted through the books for their summer reading program

Having a little fun on our lunch break

 After lunch the real work began!

Mixing the cement 

Once it was mixed it was shoveled into buckets and passed down the line to the back of the CC

And poured here!

Great pic of Peter and Mitsy

Ojay's job was to keep filling the water bucket to mix the cement

It took all afternoon but we finally finished it! 

And we all put our handprints in it

The finished product! How can work get any more satisfying?

Evelyn brought me birthday flowers!

That night at dinner we walked into the cafeteria at the deaf school and  the team had decorated it with lots of balloons and sang Happy Birthday

May and Eve made a cake 

There's also a funny story about the cake. Brooke brought the two cakes and the frosting from the freezer out and when she was frosting the cake she thought there was something really weird about the frosting. It was melting all over and looked like ice cream! When she took a piece to Eve later she said "I dont know what I did to the frosting, it's melting! I just took it out of the freezer and it's all weird now." Eve asked who had put the frosting in the freezer, Brooke said she didn't know, it was just in an ice cream container in the freezer. Eve said the frosting is in a metal bowel in the fridge. What Brooke thought was frosting in the ice cream container in the freezer was actually ice cream in the ice cream container in the freezer! She frosted my birthday cake with ice cream :) 

I loved it anyway :)

 After cake and (inadvertent) ice cream we headed back home. When we got there I went into the kitchen to get some water and walked in to find May and Sanjay, Peter and Mitsy's son, in the kitchen with their hands full of a white powder. I asked what it was and May looked so guilty. She said "Oh, it's flour." and then they both threw their handfulls of flour all over me! Apparently that is a birthday tradition there. Surprised me! When I told Brooke about it the next day she said I was lucky because it was going to be a whole heap more! They throw tons of flour on each other on their birthdays, like pounds of it! I guess I was lucky, because once you are covered in flour, it's really hard to scrub it all off! It becomes paste in the shower. Sadly I didn't take a picture of myself covered in flour. That was dumb.
So there you have it, my totally unique 25th birthday. I loved it, totally the best birthday ever :)