Same great birthdays, half the filling

There has been a lot of talk around Kigoma about birthdays lately, mostly because I have been initiating it. My roommate had a birthday on Sunday, and when I told one of his friends about it, that friend sent him cryptic messages in Kiswahili congratulating him on what sounded like the birth of a new child. "Birth day," I take it, is a concept most often used in conjunction with a new birth. Not often does someone recognize or celebrate a birth that took place years ago. How silly!

I was also surprised when one of my good friends here recently told me that his birthday was "June." "June... what?," I asked. "Just June," he replied.

Based on my conversation with that friend, it does not sound like there is a reliable birth certificate system in this region of Tanzania, perhaps because babies are so often born in dispensaries or at home, and as a result many people do not know exactly what date they were born. Perhaps the father remembers one day, and the mother another. It gets confusing after a while.

You will find that some people refer to their birthdays as a day of the week. For example, they were born on "Tuesday." And sometimes you can infer the day of the week that they were born without even asking, because they are named after it - such as people named "Jumanne" or "Mwanne," the male and female versions of the word "Tuesday". (For whatever reason, it seems like a totally disproportionate number of people here who are born on Tuesdays are named for that day of the week... an ethnography Ph.D. waiting to happen if ever there was one.)

When I talked to my roommate about the so-many-children-so-few-birthdays phenomenon, he added that job applications frequently have the date of birth section filled-out as "January 1st" or "June 1st," depending on the month the person was born.

So today is my birthday. It's hard for me to forget the date because it's one of my mother's favorite topics between mid and late August ("I will never forget the moment when..."). And as much as I feel like I should be craving an American-style birthday - with a cake, sombrero and a chorus of overly indulgent waiters - I am actually quite happy at the prospect of having a more Tanzanian birthday tonight: dinner at Gibb's with a glass of wine, and either one or two close friends or just my notepad for writing.

And if I'm really lucky, Martina Navratilova will be there in time to split a dessert with me (or at least to use her tennis racket to keep the mosquitoes away).