Bird Flu . . . .

Sure, I’ve seen some fairly attractive illustrated chickens in my life – but wow-wow-whee-wow, this one is stunning. I adore her long lashes. I’m captivated by her delicately applied lipstick, which extenuates her lovely, lush, yellow beak. And those weird red things – perhaps anatomically part of a chicken – make for beautiful pseudo-earrings. Yes reader, I’m smitten.
And yes, ‘eatable’ is the Arabic message and this is an image from the World Health Organization (in partnership with the Syrian government Ministries of Agriculture and Health) which features – on the other side – a message to reassure people that eating chicken is safe despite a world-wide concern over Bird Flu. I took this cartoon of ‘Daisy-the-Chicken’ home with me from a restaurant here in Damascus. (I named her Daisy – she was not named in the info on the back)
After the outbreak in Turkey, many Syrians worried that the pandemic would jump the boarder and inflect the chicken population here. Furthermore, it is common among the Christian community to give children eggs/little-chickens as part of the whole Easter re-birth motif. However, I’ve been told that due to Bird Flu I shouldn’t expect such fun this year. I’ve also been told that the kids spray paint the chickens and often accidentally kill them. So I’m a tad disappointed that this Easter I’ll miss-out on little pink and purple chickens running around before facing accidental death at the hands of children.
Anyway, I need to do a better job at asking more people about chicken so I can appraise the effectiveness of the World Health Organization’s ‘up-with-chickens-campaign’. I’m a bit skeptical, however, due to the culture of conspiracy theories and disinformation, as to how easily people here can be persuaded by official information coming from a big international organization. (Not a lot of love for the UN over here during the last year). All that being said, people are certainly eating chicken in public and perhaps in private as well. When it comes down to it, I think that every population has a set of similar ‘personality-types’: the same kind of folks who shunned beef during our minor mad-cow outbreak in America have neurotic counterparts in Syria, who are likewise shying away from any and all things with feathers.

For the record: I eat chicken here and I like it. I mean, look at Daisy – what’s there not to love?