Les Oiseaux
The birds have come back, those little bright yellow ones that prepared a colony of tightly woven hanging nests in the tangle of palm out back. These cute little guys couldn’t be responsible for any avian flu, could they? I brought up the subject of Avian Flu to Mohammed in French class in response to the query of what to do about congestion in and around big cities. Trop de circulation?....” Too much traffic?” is the Jeapardy response to the answer “Avian Flu”. Of course, I expected Mohammed to roll with it. Instead, he stared blankly. Connaissez-vous la maladie avec les oiseaux? No response. In the news, dans la nouvelle, chickens dying in China, il y a beaucoup des poulets qui sont mort. Nothing. He reads the papers, he listens to the radio, occasionally watche sTV, but avian flu just wasn’t ringing a bell with Mohammed. So I began to discuss what I’d heard of avian flu. The predictions by some experts of the ensuing pandemic that would occur if the flu virus should mutate and cross to the human population. His eyes narrowed with concentration. Ou est l’abri? “Where is the shelter” he asked. Ca c’est la problem. Il n’y a pas de l’abri. “That’s just it, there isn’t a shelter” He came to understand my description, but still didn’t understand. What he didn’t understand was the fear. Africa is so burdened with death on a large scale that this little malady must seem pathetic. With drought, flooding, AIDs, TB, malaria…. Avian flu has just not hit the front page here. We both began to smile as I described our president being able to whip up fear out of nothing. He began to howl as I recalled the similar flurry of excitement over Y2K. We mocked the horror of the possibility of people not being able to open their garage doors, starving while huge trucks full of food languished on the highways after the gas station computers went down and wouldn’t allow gas to pump. Hordes of refugees from the cities, trudging on foot to the countryside, where they would raid farms in desperation. Women unable to give birth because the hospital electricity was down. What are we ‘mercains going to fear next? Hello little yellow bird.