Vortex Smortex and Monkeys Too

I don't understand all this talk about the polar vortex. I am enjoying weather in the 70's and 80's with gentle ocean breezes.  Surely you people are imagining things.  Last week we had our yearly retreat for the WFP.  We went to one of the local hotels in Senegambia and had 3 days of meetings and food.  It was tough but we managed to get through it.

Here are some pictures of the M&E (Monitoring and Evaluation) team during one of our sub-meetings.
As you can see the circumstances were pretty rugged.  I don't know how we dealt with it

Many of the team members in the picture are stationed up country to do field monitoring for post emergency food supplementation. They are providing food to pregnant and nursing mothers, identifying children who are severely malnourished and referring them for hospitalization, and identifying moderately malnourished children and providing them with food to take home. If a children is moderately malnourished they provide them with Super Cereal Plus. It contains maize (58 percent), de-hulled soya beans (20 percent), dried skimmed MILK POWDER (8 percent), sugar (10 percent), vegetable oil, and vitamin & mineral premix. If you notice the 10 percent sugar content, it is to make it taste good.  Many of the malnourished children no longer have an appetite.  The sugar makes it more taste tempting to the child. The picture below of some children who are not in either of the malnourished categories but are providing good evidence that Supercereal Plus tastes good.  A bag of Supercereal Plus had broken and they are licking up the remains on the table.

Recently Rustica Carlos send me a birthday card telling me to celebrate my birthday like a monkey but stop short of throwing my caca around.  It struck a familiar chord.  At the same meeting we had a coffee break outdoors when one of my co-workers felt something like rain.  He looked up to see a monkey had urinated on him from a tree above.  Is that close enough, Rustica?  Needless to say he got a new plate of food.  I took several pictures of the monkeys -- they were pretty big. They call them red monkeys here but I do not know the scientific name.You can see a few of  them below:

A monkey family:

Thank goodness they did not celebrate in the way that Rustica suggested that I avoid.