Well, Rock Our World!

Thank you everyone for your blog comments and emails regarding our safety. We are fine. Thankfully, Kunming was spared. We didn't feel any tremors, which is odd, since reports had as far south as Vietnam (Yunnan Province borders Vietnam) and Thailand experiencing them. Around 2:30 on Monday, I just dropped off C. at school for the afternoon session and was on a bus heading downtown. G. was in the apartment with E. (the "why" is in the next paragraph). Due to the state controlled media, we hadn't heard anything about the quake until we were on the computer later in the evening and read about it on Yahoo! So most of you probably had earlier and more (accurate) information than we did. Sichuan Province is just to the north of us. You may hear the cities of Chengdu and Chongqing mentioned. That is where we traveled to in January. For an idea of distances, my guesstimation is Kunming to Chengdu is similiar to distances between St. Louis and Minneapolis. Not that far away! We have had our share of being close to troubles this year. During February, the big snowstorms were to the east of us, recently the Tibet uprisings and the Myanmar cyclone to our near west and now, the quake to the north. We have six weeks to go and only one direction left!

You also may have been reading about the EV71 (hand, foot & mouth) virus that is hitting the kindergartens and orphanages hard. It is especially hard on children younger than two years old and there has been about thirty deaths and about 30,000 confirmed cases. Well, our kids have a variant of this. The schools have been diligently checking each child's throat, hands and feet for about two weeks now. The government is being more upfront and proactive about the epidemic due to its' debacle regarding SARS a few years back. And of course, with the Olympics starting in less than three months, the government is trying to avoid making another big mess. On Friday, E.'s throat had the spots, and we had to take her to the Children's Hospital. She was given five medications and was to report back today, Tuesday. Well, this morning, C. now sported the spots in the throat area, which meant off we went with two to the hospital. E.'s condition was a lot better, but was not given the ok to return to school. Luckily, both kids have not had any sign of fever or spots on the extremities - very serious, if so. We now will have both kids home for 10 days, giving numerous medications and mouth rinses. Oh joy.

Between the natural disasters, political concerns and now this virus, G. is more than ready to pack it up and head home! Politcal events, rather than disasters or medical related events have more of an affect on me. We really want to enjoy the remaining time in China as much as possible, but for now, let's just say we are counting the days...