Bats.

So. There have been bats in Russell Prater Elementary for over ten years now, and have never caused problems with ASP.. until now. On Sunday night while the volunteers were sleeping, a girl woke up and saw a bat on the floor in front of her bed. It then flew onto the end of her bed and just sat there..so she and a couple other people killed it and threw it in the trash.

You would think that would be the end of the issue, but it isn't.

Rob, one of the Group Leaders for the church (who is a pediatrician), decided on Tuesday that this was a crisis and why hadn't we done anything about it? So, he begins researching and finds out that a bat's bite can be so small that you can't even feel it, and because the bat was in the sleeping quarters with "unconscious" people, anybody could have been bitten and not realized it. Thus, we could have an entire room of rabies-infested people. So, because he freaks out, everyone freaks out. We move our entire staff office and living quarters into the pre-k Head Start room (where we were for set-up week, it was miserable) and all of the boys move into our old room, and the girls move into the large classroom nextdoor.

So, the health inspectors come by today and inspect the entire school, (I learned it is actually illegal to kill a bat..who woulda thought?) and the schoolboard freaks out because they come in this morning and we have volunteers sleeping all over the place and they have no idea what's going on. Not only that, but there have been conference calls with the STATE health departments from Virginia, North Carolina and New Jersey deciding what the best plan of action is. I swear you can cut the tension with a needle that's how uptight everyone has been- we had girls sobbing last night thinking they had rabies and of course boys are trying to comfort them, sweeeet, I'm glad now we have to worry about them sucking face as well as getting rabies. Anyways, there are nurses here now on the other side of the school with surveys and forms everyone has to sign and fill out. The state needs an account of the situation from everyone's perspective I guess, and so some people are deciding if they want to get the series of 4 rabies shots or not. There's been word that North Carolina is leaving us tomorrow.. which means that we'll have 3 work crews for 10 sites for the rest of the week. COOL BUCHANAN COUNTY, COOL.


All I can do at this point is laugh, this is absolutely ridiculoussssssss ahahaha