I first heard the news from Sam. I will always remember where I was—sitting on the couches in the library reading Cracking the LSAT by The Princeton Review—when the news came. The swine flu pandemic had touched the American University in Cairo.
Over the past year the Egyptian government has done everything in its power to ward off the specter of swine flu. Much of Egypt’s pig population—owned chiefly be Egypt’s poor Coptic citizens like the zabbaleen garbage collectors—were rounded up by the government and massacred. A friend of mine recounted how he was driving through one of the poorer districts on the outskirts of Cairo, and he got stuck behind a slow moving microbus. A long line of cars had built up and people were honk and yelling their requests for the obnoxious obstruction to be removed. The microbus bumped and groaned through the dirt road and suddenly the side door popped open and slid wide. Plump little pink pigs tumbled forth into the road. My friend said that people freaked. I pictured Mercedes and BMW crashing into each other in an attempt to avoid the pig avalanche. It turns out the opposite was true. The Mercedes and the BMWs revved their engines and tried to run down the pigs. It was like the drivers feared that, unless killed, the pigs, like zombies, would attack, smashing through windshields, ripping out throats and gorging themselves on human flesh, spreading the plague. By night fall millions of mutant humans and pigs would roam the streets of Cairo competing for the few remaining food sources.
In addition to seeming incredibly overblown, many people feel the swine flu scare in Egypt is highly politico-religious. In a part of the world where the pig is seen as unclean, taboo, forbidden, and is only owned by the Christian minority, it understandable that as a Coptic citizen one would feel directly targeted by the government’s pig eradication measures.
These are the things I hear about—pigs tumbling from microbuses, outraged Christians—but it has never affected me personally till now. When I say that the swine flu pandemic has touched AUC I don’t mean that students are dying in the hallways or that the dorms have been quarantined. From what I hear there have in fact been 7 cases of swine flu at AUC, but none of the students were seriously affected. No, I am not even referring to a physical pandemic. Rather I mean the pandemic of pandemonium.
Yesterday, by order of the Egyptian government, the American University in Cairo was shut down until October 4th. Our two day Eid break, has just turned into two weeks. It is highly inconvenient, teachers and students alike are frustrated, the semester will be seriously set back, and I know I will feel wretched when the zombie invasion begins, but sitting at my computer, on a Thursday afternoon, having slept in till 1:30PM, with the LSAT exam in a week and a half, I can sincerely state, this is one pandemic I can get behind!
