Small Bubonic Plague Outbreak

There was a rat in the toilet this morning.

It must've swum up through the sewer pipe from the sceptic tank and was doing a breaststroke in the toilet when Nico (my seven-year-old host-family "sister") shrieked and we all came running. Milton (the 15-year-old) poured a few bucketfuls of water into the toilet to flush the critter and chased it with several cupfuls of muriatic acid and we'll see if that does the trick.

There’s a small bubonic plague outbreak in Northern Peru as well. So far it hasn’t made it any closer than 3 hours away from Callanca. They grow a lot of sugar cane in the North and the rats that carry the fleas that carry the plague like living in the sugar cane. So a rat in your toilet is rather worrisome in that sense. But actually the cycle that brings bubonic plague to your doorstep is pretty complex: wild rats, the ones that live in the fields, have to infect domestic rats, the ones that like to live in houses, and the fleas that the wild rats pass to the domestic rats have to attach themselves to you, suck your blood and pass along the infection. So in all likelihood I will not die from the Black Death though it’s possible that I could be burned at the stake or see some other medieval phenomenon get the best of me since conditions here are sometimes uncomfortably close to those of the Dark Ages.