First Day Back as Scool

Today is the first day of school since December 25, 2015. School has been cancelled and vacation extended since January 11th due to a swine flu epidemic that's swept through the caucuses and surrounding regions. Approximately 20 people in Armenia died due to swine flu complications in the first three weeks of the new year.

To put this into perspective, Armenia is a country about the size of the state of Maryland with about half the population. If 40 people in Maryland died of swine flu, in 3 weeks (with additional deaths in surrounding states), people back home would be in a state of near panic. But life here proceeds with minimal interruption form normal routine except for 3 additional weeks of vacation for grade schools.

Of course, that's not an entirely fair comparison- at home, we mount massive vaccination campaigns and have lots of PSAs about hand washing, coughing into elbows, and seeking medical care if you're elderly or have a compromised immune system.  Here, there is none of that, and people rarely use the limited healthcare resources that are available to them. Our host grandmother insists that there is no swine flu in Armenia, that it's just a trick by either the government (who doesn't want to pay to heat the school buildings) or the doctors (who want to sell you unnecessary pills).

To be fair to our host grandmother, the level of government corruption makes her first theory fairly plausible. I was more dubious about the second claim claim until she told us about a "Russian Ebola pill" that was being sold at the height of the Ebola epidemic in Western Africa a few years ago. In fact, our host grandmother's distrust of doctors runs so deep, she insists there are only two instances when you should seek their help: when you've been in a car crash, or if you're having a baby.Other than that, doctors are just a waste of money.

Given this attitude, a lack of flu vaccines, and the lack of general knowledge regarding modern germ theory and communicable disease prevention techniques (hand washing etc), it's hardly surprising that flu season here takes a much higher told than back home. But getting back to today...

So I'm finally back at work. Here, if no where else, there are a few concessions being made to the fact that we've been out of school for 3 unexpected weeks due to the flu outbreak. First there was the expected announcement (well, not an announcement, really, because that kind of clear, point-source communication style doesn't really exist in my school- instead, it's just an informal world-of-mouth system through which important institution wide messages are passed) that Spring Break will be cancelled this year to make up a third of the missed days of school in January.  There are also rumors of Saturday classes, but no one seems to be able to confirm or deny this, I guess we'll see how things turn out at the end of the week.

The next sign of the flu epidemic is the nurse, dressed in a white coat and a face mask, who is currently roaming the halls of our school, pulling children, seemingly at random (perhaps seh has some criteria for 'sick-looking-kid' of which I'm not aware...) and taking their temperatures. I don't know what happens if one of them has a fever, presumably they're sent home to rest.

Finally, about 15 different electric space heaters with associated thermometers have showed up in the school building. A few rooms in schools have radiators, but many have no functioning heat source, and even the ones that do get very chilly. Normally, students and teachers alike have been keeping their coats on all day at school. Now there are heaters and thermometers in the coldest rooms. Presumably so that the school can take steps to keep students from getting cold, which is the most popular belief of what causes just about every illness according to Armenians (if I say "I have a headache" the typical Armenian response is "Oh- did you head become cold?"). The thing is, I don't know how cold the room has to get before they'll turn the heaters on: because we're all currently sitting in a classroom in which I can literally see my breath, but the heater isn't plugged in.

It's interesting to see how differently things are done here, and difficult not to judge those differences (particularly when it comes to healthcare and public health initiatives) harshly. But I'll keep trying.