Birthdays

Lately, I've given into lots of reminiscing. On a recent day, I was thinking about birthdays. Not my own, but of others'. With the youth, I've always thought celebrating birthdays was important. It is the one day that you get to really focus in on the one person - on making sure that person feels needed, loved, cared about...
When I was younger, I don't think they mattered much to me - birthdays, that is. I've never been one to advertise my own, though I do enjoy having a few friends over just to enjoy some time together.
But it was by celebrating someone else's that I first realized how powerful celebrating someone else's life could be.
It was early December 2001. My friend Kathy and I had been in Mumbai, India for just about two weeks. We weren't there as tourists. We were there to learn, to share and to get to know people. I'd taken a two month sabbatical from a job that just didn't pull at my heart-strings. Kathy had taken 3 weeks to start off the experience with me. If you asked my dad what I was doing, or where I was going, he would have said (and proudly, most preferably at church) "She's going to volunteer in a brothel in India." Yeah, he liked to make it sound kind of racey!
The truth was, Kathy and I had been volunteering with a non-profit in DC that provided services to women, men and children who worked the streets. We loved the outreach - we loved the people, and we were pretty good listeners. We laughed, we cried, we handed out condoms. Then, at my day job, my boss had gotten to know a young woman who had just made a documentary on the selling of girls in Nepal, who were then trafficked into sex work in Mumbai. I got to know Ruchi, and one random day, asked how I might be able to help.
Ruchi had just begun a drop-in center-like place just out side of the red-light district in Mumbai, and said it would be great if I wanted to travel there for a month or two to get to know the women there. I jumped at the chance and Kathy tagged along (she later told me she never thought I'd really go through with it, but was glad I did). It turned out to be one of the most impressionable experiences of my life.
Anyway, yes, I know - I was talking about birthdays.
You see, the people we met there, were amazing. They had nothing, but would give us the shirts of their backs, if they could. They invited us to their World AIDS Day celebration, just a few days after we got there. Kathy and I went. It was after this that the woman, who led us by the hand into the crowded theater where the celebration was taking place (we'll call her Suri), told us her birthday was a few days away.
Well, Kathy and I decided to get her a cake and oranges or something like that What did we know, we weren't sure what the etiquette said, but wanted to acknowledge that it was her birthday. To be honest, I don't remember much about the birthday celebration (except for Suri's smile).
What I remember is that 2 months later, when I was saying my last tearful goodbyes, as everyone who worked at the Centre said a few words about our time together, that Suri said, through her tears, that this past birthday had been the first that anyone had celebrated for her. I'd been clueless as to what that one small little thing had meant to her. But her response to it has stayed with me all these years.
And so we started a tradition. I knew when everyone's birthday was, and for the next few years, as the Centre continued to exist like I knew it, I would call on everyone's birthday. It wasn't a big group, just 3 or 4 women. And the calls were probably pretty funny, since they didn't speak much English, and my Hindi is even less existent, but they were times to say "Happy Birthday, I love you and I miss you."
Suri and most of the other women I knew there have passed away. But one remains. And every year, on her birthday, I call her. She doesn't work for the Centre any more, where she was a social worker. And there have been years when I didn't know how to get in touch with her. But I do now - and she knows how to get in touch with me. And each, on the other's birthday, makes that call across all those miles.
But the tradition continues...now the youth are the recipients of this tradition. They've come to expect it - even putting cake requests in ahead of time.
A birthday is an excellent reason to give someone a very special warm fuzzy just for them. And an awesome day to remember those who can't get their warm fuzzies in person. I wonder whether Suri knows how important her legacy is...