Sao Nic gets pinkeye

Two weeks ago, while at a conference in the capital of Praia, the Peace Corps medical officer pulled several volunteers aside and told us, “there’s be an outbreak of conjunctivitis here on Santiago, chances are it will probably be on the northern islands soon.” This harbinger of the sickness to come was accompanied by a complimentary bottle of vizine and the advice to “wash your hands.” On arriving in Sao Nic, the pink eye had already asserted it’s presence; a quick survey on the walk to school yields dozens of bloodshot eyes and accompanying coughs. Locally, the malady is known by two names: lampada and “wyndek”, the latter of which takes it’s name from a popular dance song from the continent; it would be akin to calling your whooping cough “stanky leg” as in: “beware of the stanky leg, I hear that it’s been making the rounds.” Needless to say, being confined on a small tropical island that features high-temperatures and a culture of close body contact has encouraged the rapid spread of the sickness. It would probably be a fascinating case-study for an epidemiologist to relate how the specific anthropology of Sao Nic, where even distant friends shake hands and kiss on the cheek or dance as close as humanly possible, affects disease transmission. Sometimes it feels like people are intentionally trying to give it to you. Actually, in the case of my student Mikksolin, they are; today on walking across the polivalente, he told me, “Teacher, I have the wyndek and I’m gonna give it to you, one-hundred-percent certainty.” This was accompanied by an aggressive gesture with his index finger alternating between his sunglass-ed eyes and my face, which might be his technique moving forward this week. It all lends an especially surreal ambience to a place already steeped in the otherworldly: going out to bars to find people wearing sunglasses at night, the most mach of men wearing their wives’ shades to hide their embarrassment or the occasional dog that looks like it could be affected. Or just rabid. Regardless, there’s a zombie-like appearance of those who have it and it’s made me fantasize about having some sort of aerosolized purell which I could use like a blowtorch to push the infected away from me. There was something especially comic about walking passed the PE class this afternoon, which looked like the undead performing calisthenics.