Community and sickness....

I'm coming down with something. This is what happens when 9 germ-producing-and-expelling bodies live together under one roof. Ha! I was listening to NPR the other night after I dropped the folks off at their exercise class...one of the news stories was about the flew epedemic that swept over the world at the turn of the century. Virtually every inhabited continent on the earth was affected (and infected) and millions upon millions died. The story focused primarily on 6 communities in the US that survived the flu 'plague' unscathed, with no deaths reported. These communities included a military base, Princeton U, several other schools, etc. Researches found that the reason these communities were able to live out the epedemic without loss of life was the practice of sequestering the healthy from the outside world. This is just the opposite of qaurentining the sick off from the healthy (think Camus' The Plague). These sequested communities didn't allow any vistors and remained isolated for months. And they survived. I was thinking about what would happen if a flu outbreak happened today. My committment to this community, l'Arche, means I'm responsible for the lives of people in this house, people who are more medically fragile than most. And as a Christian, I'm responsible for my neighbor, those in and outside of my community. This is something to think about, with all this talk of impending flu. How will the Church respond if and when something like this occurs? How is the Church responding now to the AIDS epedemic in Africa? Will remain faithful when our own bodily health is on the line? I'm thinking out loud here...I'm much better at asking questions than answering them.