Bon Fèt Alfredo!

The week went by so fast. It was the Carnaval des fleurs (Flower Carnaval) Sunday, Monday and Tuesday of this week. Champs-de-Mars, which is an area near the National Palace, was packed late in the afternoon, until the early hours of the morning. Streets busy with merchants and people of all ages waiting to watch the floats, which each had a band playing their "carnaval" theme song. Music in Haiti is BIG. Honestly, Haiti has some of the best songs I've heard. Even Friday morning, you could tell people were still in a Carnaval mood; no major traffic, people are happy and not even that excited about the weekend, since it seems we were just there. 

Lucardo, Alfredo & I. Cheers to Alfie!

I only had 2 classes to give this week. I found out Thursday that Alfredo would be celebrating his 20th birthday on Saturday August 4th. I wanted to plan a little something for him, knowing that he couldn't afford to do anything himself and hadn't planned to either. You just can't not celebrate your birthday! So after class today, I took out the 7 Up bottles and cookies I got the night before, and gave him a birthday card I made with coloured pencils (brought me back to kindergarden!). Lucardo and I started singing Happy Birthday, with Alfredo looking kind of shy! It wasn't anything big or fancy. But it showed him that we care about him, that we are grateful for his presence, that his smiling face can just make our day. 

Alfredo loves the expression "TGIF (Thank God it's Friday) that I taught him our first week of class. Well, today we celebrated TGIF and his 20th birthday. Simple, but meaningful. We had fun.