Here I am, the other adult half of the Mortingames.  Weylin has worked tirelessly to get our modest little pages in order once again and to stop us from looking like liars (advertising our website when it didn’t exist for a little while–thank you, folks, for your patience!), and I’ve finally been shamed into taking some responsibility for these communiques.  So here I am to share some of the latest details of our sub-tropical adventure. The bad news is that Yellow Fever has arrived in Paraguay.  The good news is that there is much ado about it by the folks in public health and the general public.  According to the newspapers I’ve read, there are only a few confirmed cases, but the big worry is the threat of an urban outbreak, since some of the suspected cases are near Asunción.  A massive campaign to vaccinate everyone has been underway since last week, with new shipments of vaccine arriving from Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, and now France.  Everyone’s talking about getting, or trying to get, vaccinated. So when our friend, Gladys, called on Sunday to say that she was on her way to the Centro de Salud (local public health center) to get in line and did I want to come, I did (Weylin already had his and Ofelia is still too young).  She’d heard on the radio that there were, indeed, vaccines available (after a shortage last week) and the lines were long, but her plan was to go at lunchtime when most people would have quit the lines for Sunday asado (BBQ).  When we arrived, the center was crawling with people, lines stretching from the front door to the curb.  The atmosphere was, oddly, a little carnival-like–there was a guy selling sunglasses and ice cream.   So we’d figured we might be there for hours (with big bottle of water and sunscreen in hand), but Gladys, being Gladys, pushed her way past the national police at the door and got us into a short line inside, then on to a shorter line headed by someone she knew.  One woman took my name and birthdate, another unwrapped syringes, a third filled them from a single bottle of vaccine emptying so fast that, between syringes, it never made it back into the cooler there to protect it from the sweltering heat.  So before I knew it, my arm had been rubbed by a cottonball and jabbed with yellow fever vaccine, my hand stuffed with a slip of plain white paper with my name on it and the date, this to serve as my proof of vaccination (I’m guessing this won’t hold up at international borders…).  No questions were asked about allergies or health conditions, no notice of side effects or risks, no consent form.  And we were on our way.  We passed a pharmacy down the street where some soldiers were administering the vaccine to another line of people, and Gladys, in classic Gladys fashion, stepped right in there with my camera and snapped a few pictures for me.   Within a few days, a couple million people will have been vaccinated here.  Hopefully this will snuff out the virus around here, but in the meantime, we’re slathering Ofelia with bug repellent and keeping the skeeters away.  Of the three of us, they only ever bite me anyway.   

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 12:05 am and is filed under Pictures, Uncategorized, Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.