Away from culling fields, Nandurbar kids get first lessons on a foreign flu

In a two-room school on the road to Navapur8217;s now silent, empty poultry farms, tribal students wearing blue-checked uniforms are gettin...

In a two-room school on the road to Navapur8217;s now silent, empty poultry farms, tribal students wearing blue-checked uniforms are getting their first lessons on bird flu. While Navapur, north of Mumbai, counts its dead poultry by the lakhs, there is no mourning in this school in Charanmal, half-an-hour away as the class listens rapt to a discussion of the H5N1 virus, half-a-dozen hens clucking noisily in the background.

In a typical lecture, held in the school corridor on hot days like today, school teacher Sheela Gavit explains to her class of six to nine-year-olds that chickens live in 8216;8216;big houses8217;8217; called poultry farms8212;two words the Marathi medium students now repeat easily.

Sometimes, she says, chickens catch fever just like people do. Almost half the population of Navapur is illiterate. In this dry belt, the school has no learning tools and there8217;s no television set in the vicinity.

8216;8216;We get newspapers from Nandurbar on the weekends and read out the bird flu articles to the class,8217;8217; says Gavit, who holds a diploma in education, completed after her schooling in Nandurbar. 8216;8216;And most of my knowledge comes from listening to BBC radio. I know that bird flu has killed people in Japan and Indonesia.8217;8217;

Given the shortage of resources here, it8217;s not surprising that the lessons are not about exact science and some flu myths remain even inside the school walls. Gavit gives us a demo of how she grabs a nearby hen to supplement her talks that unfortunately also end up emphasising, dubiously, that only white poultry birds get the flu.

The students have been warned not to eat any meat, and not to run around on hot days to avoid catching a fever. And if they do get feverish, they must swallow 8216;8216;half a paracetamol,8217;8217; says the school teacher blithely. 8216;8216;I tell my students that they can give half a paracetamol to a sick hen also, and jaggery water is also good.8217;8217;

However, one flu pointer has been hammered into the children8217;s minds and it8217;s not about Tamiflu. 8216;8216;What happens if a person gets flu from being around a sick hen?8217;8217; the teacher asks Pravin Gulab, a 8216;8216;clever8217;8217; standard two student who8217;s hand always shoots up to answer bird flu questions. 8216;8216;You die,8217;8217; he says solemnly and quickly.