(Mark Hand, guest blogger extraordinaire. Thanks for another awesome entry, Mark!)
"Swine Flue Hits Manna Project!
No, not like that, mothers. We at MPIE are all happy and relatively healthy (if you ignore for the moment that both Dana and Holly have pink eye of all things) and - while sometimes the men act like pigs - none of us are suffering from H1M16 or whatever it is that has replaced sharks as America's obligatory summer phobia.
But MPIE has been hit by the gripe in a way we hadn't anticipated. Over the last two weeks, our library attendance has fluctuated wildly - falling from a range of 20-35 children in April to 8-25 children in May. We've been scratching our heads, reorganizing, playing a lot of Blokus and re-engaging to make sure our library is at full tilt.
At a community meal last week, however, the mother of one of library's youngest patrons informed Holly as to why Rumilomans were avoiding MPI headquarters: that's right, swine flu. Given that Ecuador's ten cases of swine flu have all stemmed from foreign travel, our new summer volunteers are, apparently, suspect.
The solution? According to our informant, we should a) take our next round of summer volunteers to the Ministry of Health for H1N1 screening, and b) publicly post a "None of us have swine flu" notice outside the library. Thoughts?
~Mark"