Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but the only thing happening in Ukraine - still - is the flu. Fortunately for me I haven't been working much and have avoided going to the cafe/my second office for the last week or so. At this point, with the majority of the work in my contract completed, I am able to work on my own pace to finish some small projects that are informational and have no specific set of guidelines. They will be done when I'm done with them, and they don't have to include anything in particular. There is also a small project that I submitted for review/feedback 2 weeks ago. Maybe by January I'll get a response to that. Who knows.
Anyways, back to the flu talk. There are now rumors going around claiming that the variation of flu here is not H1N1, or regular flu, but instead a "super flu". Although it hasn't been confirmed, apparently a lot of the scientists and politicians are saying that the flu has mutated (possibly as a result of the less than stellar health care system here). How bad is the health care system you may ask? According to someone I had lunch with yesterday (an amazing $12 hamburger) who has a sick kid, after the hospitals got shipments of Tamiflu, all of the hospital employees were allowed to purchase some for themselves and their own family - and are now reselling them at 2 and 3 times the normal price. The doctor they took their kid too offered to sell them her box of Tamiflu for only 1000UAH, or about $12. While that doesn't sound like a lot, don't forget that Ukraine is begging for international help and taking all sorts of free medicine right now from people.
Oh, and just to further the idea of how much this is the only thing that is going on here, there are rumors/conspiracy theories that claim the aerial spray the government used before this break out was actually a bioweapon. This spray was supposedly sprayed from airplanes over the major cities as something that was supposed to kill the flu, but seeing as that hasn't worked, some people are claiming that it must have been a bioweapon by the government.
Oh, and this has continued to spread while the schools have been closed for 2 weeks (with one more week of closures). I can only imagine that once all of the kids go back to school and eat each others boogers that the second round of infections will start speeding up in the country. While I'm certainly not too worried about catching anything, I'm REALLY not looking forward to finding medical help here if I do. Is it too early to leave Ukraine to go home for Christmas?
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