my life is really boring right now and I wanna go stick my head in the sand like an ostrich

Ok, so really it's not THAT boring, just relaxing and slightly more slow-paced than it was the whole time the brits were here. They headed off about two weeks ago and since then it's been back to the good ol' just Dena and Elisa team, where we never go anywhere because we're too lazy/don't want to spend money. It was getting a little bit tiresome by the end of the british invasion, going out all the time.
So I decided to start off my slowed-down pace by getting a nice FEVER. Yup, that's right. We had a big late-night send-off for Yolanda, spent Sunday being ridiculously lazy and doing nothing, and then by noon on Monday I was knocked out in bed. My fever sort of went up and down a whole lot - on Wednesday I thought I was completely healed, but by Thursday afternoon I was back in bed again. This all proved fatal to my hopes of going out to the villages for a week with Elisa andShanti (one of the staff members). Last Wednesay (September 8) was International Literacy Day, so there was a big celebration in one of the villages hosted by a Mahila Mandal (women's committee) which was formed by ex-trainees of the institute. Elisa left last Sunday morning at 6am, when I was still in bed w/fever, even though by the time I woke up a few hours later I was feeling FABULOUS and haven't felt sick since. Oh well. So instead of going to the villages I hung around here and got a taste of what it's like being the ONLY English-speaking person at the Institute. Ok, so there are some people which have pretty decent English, but none of the live-in staff have good enough English to have real conversations. But whatever. On Monday and wednesday we had our own celbratory events here at the Institute, where I got to sit and listen to long speeches in a language that I barely understand. WOOHOO! Talk about fun... The wednesday program was mostly fun though, because the girls all performed songs they had written the day before about literacy - each group of girls from a different area had written the song in their native language (in case you weren't aware, India is a country with some several million languages or something ridiculous like that). It was really great to see a bunch of the girls get up and give speeches about literacy in front of lots of people - when people think "rural/tribal girls" here, they generally think of someone really shy, low self-esteem and not too intelligent. Plus, I was able to understand a lot of what they were saying!
The other highlight of these past two weeks has been the appearance of a large monkey-type-creature who's not actually a monkey but I don't know what it's called. He came to the Institute on wednesday and we keep seeing him around, climbing around the roof and today he was sitting on top of a cement window awning eating our maize from the field!! He's not afraid of anything and if you get close or throw sticks he bares his teeth at you - the girls have had a lot of fun watching it and running away whenever it starts to move....
At any rate, time for me to sign off!
Much love,
Dena