What does a 109-year-old Maryland woman want for her birthday? For Jennie Libertini, the answer was simple: to play bingo.
“When she was asked what she wanted to do for her birthday, she said she wanted to have a bingo birthday party,” Marcy Shea-Frank, development director for the Little Sisters of the Poor at St. Martin’s Home in Catonsville, tells PEOPLE. “So, that’s what she got.”
But there were other ways Libertini was honored during her special party on Monday, Shea-Frank says.
“One of the girls Catholic high schools in Baltimore City came out here and spent a couple of hours singing to her before the party started,” she adds. “She just loved it.”
It’s never taken much to make Libertini happy. The first-generation American grew up “very poor” in Baltimore with her Sicilian immigrant parents and three siblings, according to the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic nonprofit that “cares for the elderly poor.”