Influenza Porcina, Día 6

Just a brief update.

Mexico's president Felipe Calderon has declared what is basically a forced vacation for everyone in the country. From tomorrow through Tuesday May 5th, pretty much everything will be closed. For more on this and other developments from a perspective within Mexico, I strongly urge you to click on the Mexico Today blog on the left side of this page.

What this means for us is that our Internet supply is likely to be cut off completely, since we don't have access to it in our home and rely on cafés and cultural centers for our connection with the outside the world. We'll do the best we can to seek out a connection to stay in touch, but basically this is going to be a weekend of hibernation. (What will we do with no TV and no Internet? Good question. Probably a lot of books will be read... Thank goodness I still haven't started my new 500-page copy of Moby Dick yet.)

Other than that, though, there is still no need for panic where we are. People are still wearing surgical masks, and there were fewer people out on the running trail this morning. Restaurants and cafés are closed, which is a real bummer. Most of all we're just checking the news every day, hoping fervently that there won't be a border closing. We're scheduled to have visitors next week, and we've been looking forward to it for months now. (That's right, President Obama, there is no need to close the border because the virus has already spread. Listen to the experts! They're smart people!)

But it's weird - when I stand on our rooftop and look out over Lagos, as I do every morning, life seems, well, pretty much the same. The mountains are still there in the distance, the trees are still green, the birds still chirp, the giant wasp still buzzes past my head annoyingly... We're still here. And we're not going anywhere.

Yet.