Swine flu: the view from Jilotepec, Mexico

“It is nothing. Here we are all healthy and there are no cases in the hospital.”

These are the words of my landlady Lucia, giving me her opinion as we stir our morning coffees, watching sparrows darting among the branches of the avocado trees in the garden. She has been highly sceptical of the whole scene ever since news broke. There is a knock at the front door. Lucia’s friend has come with fresh milk from her farm up the road. The lady comes in and sits down with us. She tells us how her cows were particularly restless this morning, and that she had a hard time milking them. We move on to talk about cows in general and, unsurprisingly, the weather. We do not discuss the flu. Nor have we ever really. Apart from a couple of questions that I have posed, the conversation in the house has been uncontaminated, jovial and flu-less.

It has been remarkably normal in Jilotepec over the past few days. The orange-seller still comes round every morning, pushing his trolley full of fruit. The butchers still stir huge vats of bubbling tripe outside their shops. The women still chat in the square. What has been intriguing to follow is that for all the hysteria back in Britain, here, in the birthplace of the virus, nothing has really changed at all. Classes have been suspended until Thursday though, and this has been the only notable distinction: that there are children everywhere, waiting to go back to school. A Mexican news website reported this weekend of a child who had asked his mother for “no more holidays, I have had enough, Mummy!” A strange point of view for a youngster, perhaps; but the young boy’s comment sums up the current mood, certainly an hour outside of Mexico city – that people just want to get back on with life.

Even in Mexico City, the hotbed of the problem, things are calm and people are still out and about and going to work – because they have to. President Felipe Calderon has proposed a multi-million dollar “reactivation” of the economy, along with a furious tourist drive, to try to beckon back those who scrambled onto one-way flights to Europe last week in their haste to avoid the virus. Schools, bars and restaurants are set to reopen before the week is over, along with libraries, museums and other public buildings.

For a few, the swine flu outbreak has brought the death of a loved one. But these numbers are very small, and pale in comparison to the figures quoted monthly with reference to lives claimed by the drug trade. The Health Secretary has commented that the number of Mexicans who have died from swine flu is roughly the same number as those who die from seasonal flu, a rare piece of clear information from the Ministry of Health, which has been systematically confusing the country with befuddling data. First, they mixed up the numbers of those affected but alive, those suspected to be infected and those dead. Then, they gave out massively inflated figures for possible mortality rates and finally they confirmed that, so far, laboratory results have revealed that only 29 people have died from the virus. This may well rise, but whatever figure is reached will still be dwarfed by the incessant drug-gang murders.

Fearful international perception may have dented the popularity of Mexico for tourists, but it has not affected regular, daily life for millions of Mexicans. Tomorrow morning, the orange-juice man will come by, without a face-mask. Mexico has come through more than swine flu before, and it is not going to stop him wandering the streets every day with his trolley of fresh fruit.