Matotea's first birthday party

Birthdays and holidays are a strangely western sort of construct. Rather naively, I hadn't really realized this, at least not before I met Viriamu. Frankly he doesn't celebrate birthdays and he never did as a young boy - which I find pretty hard to imagine, birthdays and Christmas were such a focal point of my childhood. And while people do definitely celebrate birthdays here in French Polynesia, in Rurutu the commercial trimmings are much less obvious, and while it's taken a while for me to get used to this I actually find it refreshing to opt out of the consumer mindset. After all why not rejoice in life every day of the year? That said, I did put my foot down and we had a little party for Matotea's first birthday - it was pretty funny, she was absolutely bewildered by the whole thing! But her brothers and cousin enjoyed it...