Zombie attack imminent!

So I get up, am eating breakfast and drinking my morning tea while watching BBC Middle East, and there's a scroll across the bottom of the screen about how if zombies existed, scientists say they'd destroy civilization unless there was a rapid and aggressive response. I figure that it's a joke, or someone accidentally cut & pasted something, but so I could cover my bases when blogging about it, I go to the BBC online to double-check... and yep, there it is.

I'm doing my research on the wrong subject, apparently.

Ironically, modeling the spread of infectious diseases is a sub-field of geography called (appropriately enough) medical geography. It's an important area of study, very generously-funded (in other words, geographers can make a lot of money doing work in this field), and now I'm questioning my own research goals.

I could be researching zombies.

OK, to apply all this to Ram'allah, near the construction zone on Main St., there are several little kids who sell passersby packs of gum--think the smallest packs of Wrigley's Spearmint, but the trademark-violating Palestinian equivalent--for 2 shekels. Well, my second day in Ram'allah, I met two of these kids, and one of them is named Yusuf--which is the Arabic equivalent of my name (and, if you don't know the story behind the URL for this blog, iss-mee is Arabic "my name is"). Yusuf and his buddy gave me the hard-sell, but I didn't buy. I put them off with a strategic use of bukra--saying I'd buy a pack tomorrow.

Well, the next day I walked through the same area and Yusuf and his buddies found me again, and when I initially refused to buy, Yusuf protested that I had promised yesterday that I'd buy today.

So what does any of this have to do with zombies or medical geography? Well, Yusuf's friend Mu'awi asked where I was from, and when I said America, he asked me if I had...something. I didn't recognize the word, so I asked him to repeat it a couple times: it sounded like infalu'enseh. I still didn't get it until he put his hands over his face and pretended to cough. Influenza. Yeah, the H1N1 panic is worldwide, and associated with the U.S. Interesting, because in America we tend to think of pandemic disease as originating from elsewhere and intruding on our borders.

That's all I have for now. I hit a dead-end with the one NGO I was counting on for access to some project sites, and my options are narrowing--I'm waiting for replies to some e-mails I've sent, and depending on those results, I have to do some cold-calling of contacts people gave me.

I can't imagine what all this would be like without the internet and cell phones. Maybe it would be a lot more like what I'd prefer: I could just go somewhere and talk to people there, rather than having to go through multiple levels of bureaucratic barriers and electronic communication.