Chlorox   234

Mayo           27.7

Eggs             12.5

Fideos         21.6

Beans           54

Guavas        40   (on account of their high vitamin C content)

Average number of carts in line for each cashier last weekend     15

Fall in sales of pork    70-90%

Fall in price of live pigs 22 pesos to 11 pesos (per kilo presumably)

Number of people directly employed by the pork industry 350,000

Source: Reforma, AM 6th May 2006

No news and no work means conspiracy theories.  I am constitutionally averse to these.  What I know about epidemics from years teaching history of science and medicine and from my husband’s work on risk some years back is helpful.  The evolution and spread of viruses is hard to predict.  Better safe than sorry, even if safe means in retrospect that many people say what was all the fuss about.

Meantime, looking over my posts for the last few days, I realize that I keep coming back to the point that it is the people in remote rural locations who are some of the poorest, who have the least access to medical care, to schooling, to paying jobs to supplement their subsistence farming.  And this ties in another thread on this blog, the thread  that questions whether the current enthusiasm for small farms is well founded.

Small remote rural communities have always had this problem.  The Homestead Act in the United States and the settlement of Australia and Canada had many, many benefits, some of which commentators such as Adam and Cindy have pointed out.  But one disadvantage was the isolated life which often hit women particularly hard.

And women could be ingenious in addressing that problem.  In 1897 Canadian farm women founded the Women’s Institute, an organization that spread widely and that has done a great deal of good.  In the next post, I’m putting up a piece I wrote about fifteen years ago about my mother’s experience with the Women’s Institute.  It’s nice to have something cheery to end a gloomy week.

Yes there are desperately poor people in Mexico.  But there is also an enormous middle class and hordes of people whose standard of living has been rising.  The family I described in yesterday’s post would, according to measures described recently in the Economist, count as part of the world’s huge emerging middle class.

The medical system is not that of the United States.  But there is at all social levels a good bit of coverage.  The worst off are those in remote rural areas because doctors don’t want to live and work in remote rural areas.  But in the larger cities both the state and the private hospitals have excellent doctors who are tied into the English-speaking network of conferences, research, courses, etc.  In the smaller cities, perhaps not so good but they are linked in for emergencies to the larger centers.

For the family I described yesterday, I would say the level of care is much superior to that available in England in (say) the 1970s.  For us,  the care for most conditions is equivalent to the United States with the plus that the the doctor talks to you.  Only for a rare and unusual or very critical condition would we consider going to the States.

What’s it like here in Guanajuato, people ask?  Well, the good news is that it’s like Christmas.  Thanks to all the old friends who have taken the time to contact us and ask how things are.

We, like everyone else, remain holed up.  The level of compliance with the instructions to avoid contact as far as possible is astonishing, especially given that a stroll through the city is a very important part of life for most Mexicans and indeed one of the most appealing aspects of living here.   Mind you, with churches, restaurants, bars, museums and so on closed, the reasons to go out are diminished.

The major public hospital in town has set up one isolation ward and had one death from flu-like symptoms.  The supermarkets, according to a friend who ventured out yesterday, were out of basics such as  chicken and beans, but perhaps they have been re-stocked by now. The internet is half its usual speed, presumably because so many people are on.

It’s hard not to imagine that many small businesses, restaurants, street stands, small shops, and the like will be wiped out.  The costs even to large businesses and to the government have to be staggering.

The closedown of all non-essential government and private businesses and services for five days is a bit less draconian than it might appear as this is a “puente” a three day weekend.   It’s for the Cinco de Mayo so famous in the States as a Mexican holiday but celebrated here with about the same vigor as Americans celebrate George Washington’s Birthday.  That is, at least people won’t be missing a favorite  celebration.

Since I’m getting letters and comments about Mexican poverty and rural life I thought I’d post about what life in one of these communities is like.  Last week, by sheer chance, I went back to a “rancho” as such communities are frequently called that I have been visiting regularly for a dozen years.  It has somewhere between 3000 and 5000 people and schools through middle school.

This rancho is only about 8 miles from Guanajuato and has very regular bus service so people can get work apart from tending their small farms.  This makes me think it would be about the same level economically as La Gloria, where people have had work in the pig farm.  (Places in the mountains or in the south of the country or too far from towns for paid work would be much worse off).

I’m visiting María (not her real name) who worked for me for four or five years before unexpectedly getting pregnant with her fifth child.  I drive along the half mile now mostly paved road into the rancho from the main road.  Like many such the buildings are clustered around the crumbling walls of the old hacienda and the hacienda chapel is still the church.

When the haciendas were broken up, the former peons (workers) got pieces of land both near the hacienda and further away for farming.  I park on the street.  There’s still room though unlike when I first went lots of families now have pick up trucks, also making it much easier to get work.

I go in through the gate in the wall.  I called earlier to make sure the family were home.  Everyone now has a cell phone whereas when María was working for me they were unheard of.  So María’s four girls are waiting and accompany me past four family houses on the family lot, to María’s at the back.  It sits on half an acre of land, dry and dusty now at the end of the dry season, though the canna lilies inside the gate make a bright red splash.

María is waiting on the concrete patio three steps up.  We go into the living room, a spacious room perhaps 11 by 20 feet.  María and I sit on the sofa which is covered with a cloth, perhaps an old sheet, because it was almost certainly bought second hand.  The girls bring metal and plastic chairs from the dining room and perch on them, all eyes.  It’s an unusually large family for modern Mexico.

María offers me a glass of aguamiel (literally honey water), the sweet juice of the maguey, which is now boiled down to the fashionable agave nectar, but formerly was turned into pulque.  María’s mother who collected the agua miel from the maguey on her land in my honor no longer makes pulque but you can still buy it in the rancho.

As we catch up, I look around.  The floor is tiled.  The walls are whitewashed and framed photos of her girls and her husband are hung at intervals high on the walls. The room also has an armchair, a large dining table with an embroidered tablecloth, and a stand with the television, the boom box, neatly arranged CDS, and a display of toys and trophies.

Behind the living room are two bedrooms, though I’ve never been invited to look at those. To the right is the shower room.  The village has a well that pumps water a few hours a day.

To the left is the modern kitchen about 12 by 12 with a gas stove, an older refrigerator that means tortillas keep fresh for four or five days, a built in concrete counter top, though no cabinets.  In front of this is the room where the family usually eats with the metal and plastic table, about the same size.

Out back, though we don’t go there today,  is the black kitchen, the kitchen with the traditional wood fired bench stove for making tortillas on the comal, since gas stoves are nothing like as good for this. This is also a place where the maize cobs are stored.

The fourteen-year old, fashionably dressed in jeans and a more modest top than my English niece sports,  tells me she has a scholarship to go to Guanajuato one afternoon a week for a computer class, but she is way ahead because she earlier learned to use our computer.  The next who has long had problems with allergies and eye infections, has just been fitted (by the equivalent of social security in the clinic in the next rancho) for new glasses that help a lot, though she still has to apply her medicines.  The third, always the life and soul of the party, is as full of jokes as ever.  And the littlest, now eight, has been chosen to compete in the state mathematics contests for the last two years, and expects to see the friends she has made again this year.

María’s husband comes in.  He’s out of work at the moment, work for bricklayers, the standard non-farm job for rural laborers, is never steady.  He went to the States for a year but was desperately homesick and made no money so has no thoughts of going again.  María works one day a week.  So money is not abundant.  I’d guess he averages US$100 a week, perhaps a bit more, María $20, state scholarships for girls who all get good grades say another $20 plus some basic groceries.

They used to grow all their own maize but the horse died.  They had no money for another.  And besides un-irrigated maize here fails two years out of seven on average.  They also used to keep a pig, chickens for eggs, and a few ewes and lambs but these have also gone and I don’t have the chance to find out why.

María’s husband has built this house, making the bricks himself up his land. He takes me upstairs to see his current project.  One great thing about brick and concrete houses is you can always go up.  He’s adding two bedrooms and a bath on the roof.  The walls and the roof are done, what remains are the windows, painting, wiring, and plumbing.  The view is great over the rancho and the dam (low at this time of year) to the hills opposite.

So this is not misery, it’s not even poverty on a global scale.  Nor is it a life cut off from the rest of the world: ten years’ schooling, trucks, cell phones, televisions, medical care.   This in a place where there are still illiterate grandparents who spent all day toiling over the grindstone, where the parents had only primary education.  Rural Mexico going in to the second decade of the twentieth century is a very different place from even a decade ago.

If only the economic fall out of the flu does not bring this change to a halt.

Is the government over-reacting?  I think this is one of those cases where the government, advised by the CDC and the WHO, had to act.  Following SARS, there are lots of protocols in place.  Rumors aside, I find it hard to imagine any government doing this unless there were good reasons.

Why aren’t there firmer numbers?  I assume because they are very difficult to get. How many individuals have had a mild case without even realizing it?  How many doctors have seen cases in the past weeks and months and not realized it was a new kind of flu?  How many people now are not going to doctors or hospitals because they doubt that tamiflu (or its variants) is available?  And how many people (particularly older rural people) are not going because they still prefer the local curandero to the hospital which in their opinion is where you go to die. (This is not a crazy notion, it was the traditional role of the hospital into the twentieth century as historians of medicine have made quite clear.)

All remains very quiet here though I doubt this can last.  I shudder to think about the economic impact.

Finally, here are some words of sanity on the flu itself.   Take the author’s account of Mexico with a hefty pinch of salt though.  It´s not as backward as she suggests.

Oh, and then there’s swine flu. At the best of times, Mexico is a huge cauldron for rumors.  Now its cup runneth over.

So let’s forget rumors and just focus on what’s going on in my town of Guanajuato, a city of about 150,000 people 250 miles north of Mexico City. It’s both calm and totally changed.

I find I’m writing this in a dead pan voice, both because I am tired and because it seems better than panicky or cheery extremes.

I went out this morning at 11 for groceries.  Half the normal traffic, the town eerily quiet.  All the attendants in Mega (the big supermarket in town) had face masks and so did many of the customers, pretty amazing given that these are already a black market item.  The store was pretty empty, the carts of the customers did not suggest panic buying or hoarding, though stocks of hand sanitizer, chloro, sanitary towels, and long life milk were dwindling.

Coming back at 1pm the streets were choc a bloc, parents with children in hand streaming here there and everywhere, the government having just announced the closing of all schools in the country.

Between one in ten and one in twenty people on the street were wearing masks, again pretty amazing since they can no longer be bought.  The toll booth attendants on the highway were wearing rubber gloves and masks.  There was no discernible pattern: those who wore masks might be muscled thirty-year old brick layers or sixty-year old society ladies, single people or families with babies.

We emailed colleagues at the National University about canceling seminars etc (the University is closed until at least the 6th May but plans have to be made for the rest of the semester) to discover that most of them have already left for their country houses, or relatives outside the city.

That capitaleños are leaving is not surprising. With water already in short supply in the capital (even before the water cutoffs over Easter our apartment building was regularly buying water from the “pipa” as the water truck is called) and the pre-rainy season heat, it would be good to escape even were it not for swine flu and earthquakes.

We’re hunkering down for a while.   That’s easy for us since we have a large pleasant house and garden, work from home anyway, and have had a busy social life recently.  Not everyone has that luxury.

Here are good sources of information.  Try the newspaper El Universal although their website is getting slower and slower. Ana Maria Salazar has a blog in Spanish and English and lots of black humor. Inside Mexico reports in English and would welcome input. All Twitter.

Tomorrow.  Thoughts on why it seems so hard to get the facts. And more.