Busy busy bumblebee

Ok, ok, so I didn't send an update last week..... i'm sorry sorry how can you ever forgive me?!!
koi bat nahi! (aka "whatever" in hindi) I've been VERY BUSY. Last week we went on a little trip to Jabhua, which is a village about 4 hours from Indore. In Jabhua there is a school run by a german organization which has been in the process of installing a solar kitchen over the past several months. For those of you who don't know, we use solar cookers most of the time at the institute (though not so much with the monsoons here - lack of sun is a problem). At any rate, Jimmy has been very involved in the field of solar cookers and is starting to manufacture them himself now. So he has been helping this project in Jabhua the whole time, and now a week ago the inauguration was scheduled. So we went to Jabhua to help set up for the inauguration and run it and what not. Now in India, things tend to happen rather slowly..... in other words, when we arrived in Jabhua just over 24 hours before the inauguration was scheduled, we discovered that as yet the building consisted of brick walls partially covered in cement with no floor or ceiling! So we had a lot of work cut out for us.... First we had to attach the clockwork to each of the 5 solar dishes (so that they rotate along with the sun) and then clean things up and what not. There was one point where Elisa and I had to move a lot of dirt or "maity" in Hindi. In India such things as shovels, wheelbarrows etc don't really exist except for a few people who have access to the west (aka our institute). So instead we did it the Indian way - pulling dirt into a large dish and carrying it on our head! it was fun, except the ring kep falling off my head before I could get the dish up, and my scalp got a little sunburnt so it started to hurt a bit. At any rate, lets just say we only got three hours of sleep that night but the inauguration went quite well.
This past week has been full of visitors. First one of the germans came (the germans were volunteers in Jabhua who had basically been in charge of the solar project). On Wednesday a whole group of British Student Action India volunteers came to see the institute - it was a little disorienting being around so many white people speaking fluent english! Elisa and I were joking about how we should tell them to get out of our country.... those brits think they can just stick up a flag anywhere and rule us! Well we'll show them!! Actually, they were all quite nice and two guys from their group are going to be working with Jimmy starting tomorrow, so it will be nice to have other english speaking people our age around. Plus there's a new volunteer coming from England on Friday!
Well I'd better be going. I have to warn you though that i won't be writing for another two weeks - Next weekend we're going to Pune for a meeting and touring around and stuff. Unfortunately I've heard that it's not the most exciting city. whatever.
Oh, and I would like to point out to you all that you can leave commentson my site! At the end of each message there's a thing that says the number of comments posted, and if you click that you should be able to write stuff.
Much love,
Me