two cents about bird flu

So, Bulgaria HAS to have avian flu within its borders...Every neighboring country has confirmed having the disease, and I can't imagine birds going, "Oh, there's the Bulgarian border...Let's steer clear of there."

We have been joking about it since September, but now the jokes have hit a new pitch. It used to be jokes among PCVs...Now it is a joke among my students. My unwordly, uninterested-in-world-events-besides-bad-music students.

Today a number of people were absent from my 6th grade class (side note: it made for an AWESOME 40 minutes) and when I asked where everyone was, one of the funnier boys made the twisted face that indicates death and said two little words: "Petitsa Grip!" (Literally translated: Bird Flu!) The rest of the kids laughed and started making coughing sounds and death faces of their own.

I had to laugh. And I did, a bit. It's fun to joke about potentially horrible things...It's all fun and games until it morphs into a human-to-human transmitted plauge and we PCVs are evacuated from the country, denied entry into the US (cause you know they ain't letting us in when we've spent the last 8 months in an infected land) and are sent for a season of "quarentine" in Guantanamo.

Some volunteers have interesing stories about the mass slaughter of birds in their towns (this weekend in Omurtag Tia's landlady told us they had just killed 50 turkeys and she ran out of room in her freezer so she's having to boil it in jars) and even in my little town of Straldja I have seen 4 dead birds over the past two months laying on the ground with no obvious cause of death. Needless to say, I will be careful in my consumption and usage of eggs here. And I'll watch myself around the bird, uh, droppings in the street....

But as I say, it makes a heck of a joke at the moment, one even my kids get. Let's just hope this thing stays with the birds......