Communicable Diseases, or "Even teachers have sick days"

This was to be our big day at school. Peter's students have been preparing questions for us, so we were to be the focal point of the class.

Instead, we got another lesson in infectious diseases. If you refer back to the first entry, I described how a "stomach flu" had been making the rounds at the W3C meeting in Cannes. We had our worst day of symptoms on March 5, with a trailing edge in my case on March 6. Peter greeted us this morning with "thanks for bringing illness to Moldova with you." Yes, we verified that the incubation period was approximately 4 days. Backtracking, that means that we acquired this illness at the W3C reception on Wednesday evening (along with 300 other people), who have now gone back to their host countries and companies. As one example, people from the meeting in France also got sick on Saturday on their train trip to Spain. We each blamed it on bad food, until you put the details together. At least this is not a life-threatening disease (although it does give one about a day of extreme unpleasantness). But it does give you pause to think of serious communicable diseases at events like this. And I feel terrible for having visted this illness upon my son on this trip, which is made only worse by knowing that he will be spreading it around Mereseni.

So, we're not going to the school today. The day (at least for now) is inside, reading books and magazines, and staying warm. The ducks and geese are awake (they're busy honking away), and the sun is shining in a beautiful blue sky. The frost that had nearly covered the window has thawed.

I went on a walk up to the main road and to the town (two small stores and the local culture hall) with Diana and Dmitru. I saw the two stores, two bars (no fear of Peter hanging out there) and the culture hall that has the disco.

Over dinner, we had a discussion about the relationships of people in the village. Maria described how she had many godchildren in Mereseni. We were a bit confused in the godchildren discussion until we understood that children at baptism have many godparents, typically 10-20. One of her hotshot godchildren was Maria (seen here in the far left of the picture from the next day at school) and Maria thinks that Peter is pretty neat.