Hey Everyone,

In short Porky Pig (in the form of swine flu) has ruined the final 3 weeks in Mexico!! Basically in the last 48 hours things have happened pretty quick and I made some rush judgments based off of the information I had available to me (which even now I still feel like were the best decisions). I am actually writing this email as I ride home on the bus from Chicago and would not have envisioned any of this even on Saturday….

For people who have not been paying attention to the news and swine flu here is the abbreviated version of its originals at least how it goes in my head to sound interesting. Basically some pig farmer in Mexico spent too much time, in a possibly questionable manner, with his pigs….anyway when stuff like that happens an influenza strains that would typically only be transmitted between pigs gets into the human population. Eventually pig man heads into Mexico City to see his relatives and from there it starts spreading from person to person. Ok from this point on out it is facts. When I left Sunday 1500 people in Mexico City alone affected, with at least 80 dead and the school system (including universities) were closed until May 6. In Guadalajara, which was where I lived, they had also closed the our University for Monday and Tuesday, but now they are also closed until May 6. In my mind waiting 2 days didn't make any of this go away, influenza spreads so easy and there is no way as many people who go back and forth from Mexico City that Guadalajara and its 8 million people would be starting to see cases soon. Also by that point there were cases in the US in Texas, California, New York and Canada. The difference is that people in the U.S. all have survived, people in Mexico get the influenza and can die. For my money that says take the chance 20+ hours away from the source with better healthcare, rather than close to the source with questionable health care. Also having the immune systems diseases I do (for instance allergies) I already am at risk when it come to just the normal influenza, so when you add all this up the choice was easy in my head ditch the rest of school. This choice would have been made much easier had I been able to contact anyone from my university, but of course people there don't know the word crisis management and basically left it up to the students to find out that the university was close and figure out how to handle this. Even though they had our contact information no contact was made to me (some other people's teachers email them to tell them that there were no classes), but no coordinated effort was made to let us know anything. Also I tried to contact all the people at the school in charge and got no response and actually still haven't. I guess that is one difference between the U.S. given the same situation back home there would be a coordination response or at least something telling people to let them know that things were being considered. In Mexico the response is, "We will work on it when we are back in the office during office hours on Monday morning". Of course once I get rested from the red eye flight I will have to get all of this straightened out now with the right people back home, but in the end I did only miss the last 3 weeks, so I am basically only giving up the last 4 Spanish credits I would have earned.

Either way I just though instead of having to answer the why did I come home question a dozens of times individually I would sent out a quick update to talk about it. I will try to do a proper update with pictures soon…

As always if you want off my update lists just let me know!

Love & Peace!