Chapter 338
In June, the weather is getting hotter and hotter. Flies, rats, mosquitoes and cockroaches have become a problem recently.
Zhu Yuyan had never paid attention to them before. It’s not that she didn’t know these pests existed, but she didn’t know that they would also take up part of Su Chunjun’s official documents in a dignified manner.
Since the distribution of grain, Zhu Yuyan’s name has been known to no one in the city, no one knows. In the past, she used to be the one who pitched in, but now it’s the turn of others to send her a letter of thanks and ask her to donate money and medicines.
Now there is no very effective anti-rodent and anti-insect medicine, Zhu Yuyan realized that the original people have been using arsenic to eliminate rodents and kill insects, a medicine for a hundred uses.
In addition to rats, is to take rice balls mixed with arsenic in the rat holes, the rats ate and died.
Of course, children will also die if they eat it by mistake. And such a tragedy every year, more newspapers do not bother to report one by one.
In addition to mosquitoes and flies, also arsenic, mixed in water, sprinkled into the nearby ponds, ah, the river, the river will set up a pole to hang a dead mouse, or simply just set up a pole, indicating that the river has been poisoned, and so on the natural flow of the water, dilute the poison, people and animals can naturally continue to use the water here.
Similarly, every year, there are countless people and animals who mistakenly use the poisoned water.
Cattle, donkeys, horses, chickens, sheep and other water poisoning is already very bad, even worse is that some people do not know that the water has been poisoned to kill insects, draw water home to cook, the result is that the family ate the poisoned water after eating the rice vomiting and diarrhea, a serious illness. Or the water was poisoned fish, some people picked up fish home to do to eat, also vomiting and diarrhea. The only thing that is worth celebrating is that the cockroaches thrown into the water seldom kill people.
Arsenic is also used to get rid of cockroaches and bedbugs. There are even a few people who have the occasional whim to apply arsenic to the itchy bugs on their bodies, and end up poisoning themselves to death.
Now Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom have a special pest control drugs, but the price is high, know very few people. The general public is still using the old way of buying arsenic to get rid of insects and rats.
In areas where the living environment is very poor, mosquitoes, flies and rats spread a lot of diseases, and the most easily victimized are small children. It is not that the elderly are not victimized, but it is because the elderly usually die before they live to the age of becoming old. In those places, the only weaklings are small children.
Mr. Su Chunjun’s desk is a request from the Health Bureau, saying that it is now the season to kill rats and flies, and that not killing rats and flies will breed many diseases, and the poor people who are sick go to the doctor rarely, and don’t have the money to buy medicine, and basically die of illness, and those who die of illness without a timely burial will spread more diseases, and this is a vicious circle.
To sum up, I would like to ask Mr. Su to agree that they should carry out some necessary de-rodenting and de-insecting work in the city.
Doesn’t that seem particularly public-spirited?
But the fact is that the Health Bureau is here to ask for money.
The Health Bureau isn’t usually taken seriously, it’s like a little pathetic compared to a few other bureaus. However, the full name of the Health Bureau is Sanitary and Epidemiological Defense, and the focus is on epidemic prevention. In the Qing Dynasty, there was a special department for epidemic prevention, when people realized that dirty environment and animals such as flies, mosquitoes and rats could spread diseases and epidemics, which had to be killed on time and effectively.
The city is a large number of people gathered in places, is unable to rely on the natural self-purifying self-cleaning function to maintain health, there must be a special department and institutions to deal with the arrangement of health and epidemic prevention.
The Health Bureau was created for this purpose.
In the past, the Health Bureau distributed poisonous rat poison and rat pills from door to door, and regularly cleaned up garbage piles and sewers.
But later it was reduced to collecting sanitation fees.
Zhu Yuyan still remembers that the sanitation fee for the Zhu Family Building used to be eighteen dollars a month. Zhang Ma scolded them for a long time, saying that they were collecting money for nothing and not doing any work.
Zhang Ma: “In the past, they would even give out pills, but now we have to buy all the medicine ourselves, and they just collect the money.”
Now it seems that the Health Bureau still has this mandate to buy medicine. I just don’t know if it’s an excuse to ask for money.
Su Chunjun threw the report from the Health Bureau aside and said, “To make me believe that they will buy medicine to distribute to the people is not as good as believing that the Japanese are all great benefactors. These are the ones who saw that the police department got a grant and came to me to ring the bell for money. I won’t give them a cent.”
Zhao Shuli said, “Not a penny will not be given. The money printers work every day, but this month’s paychecks were sent down and went up.”
The price of goods went up, and the paychecks went up with it. But no matter how much they go up, there’s nothing to buy. A box of matches outside is going up to ten dollars, and cigarettes are even more unaffordable. Now sell cigarettes stalls are closed not to do, selling cigarettes in the morning to earn a hundred dollars, to the evening a disk account found also lost five hundred, you say angry not angry?
Zhu Yuyan also received letters of thanks from elementary school, charity schools, Tzu Chi Homes and homes for the elderly asking for donations, hoping that she could donate a batch of Western medicine to get rid of pests. It is said that the children and elderly in the Tzu Chi Homes and homes for the elderly sleep with rats and cockroaches at night, the tables of their houses are full of flies, and the children’s bodies are full of mosquitoes and bedbugs with big bites.
In order to ask her for donations, the letter writer described the situation in such a miserable way that it was shocking to read.
At night, Zhu Yuyan went home and showed the letter to Su Chunjun.
Su Chunjun read it and sighed: “Alas, it’s impossible to live anywhere. These places have no source of income and are worse off than the common people.”
Ordinary people a family at least relatives are together, each other have a care, so it is not miserable to the end.
He said, “There are quite a few lost children going over to the elementary school.”
Nowadays, there are only a few elementary school that have daily walk-in schools, and most of them are still mainly boarding schools. Because it makes more money that way.
But that was before. Now that food is in short supply, the roads are impassable, and it’s not easy to get out of the city, families are going to have a hard time getting by, and elementary schools are going to have an even harder time getting by with a bunch of kids in their charge.
Hundreds on hundreds of pounds is in this case, there are some parents simply do not come to pick up their children, abandoning them in the school.
There are children who live in the countryside and have to be picked up by their families every time they go home, and every time they come to school they have to take a car and then a horse-drawn carriage, and it is not easy to get around. When they are asked to tell where their home is and which village they live in, they cannot.
Some schools are so hard-hearted that they kick the children out into the street. Some schools are a little softer, so they keep the children, and the whole school lives on a shoestring.
But what can last a while cannot last a lifetime.
Six or seven months have passed from last year to this year, and I am afraid these schools can no longer support themselves.
Charitable elementary school, on the other hand, specialize in accepting children from poor families. While ordinary elementary school are still losing children, the number of children in charitable elementary school will only increase. The charitable elementary school rely solely on donations to make ends meet, and they will not be able to sustain themselves any longer than the ordinary elementary school.
A charity home is a place for orphans, disabled and homeless women. Homes for the elderly are places that take in homeless elderly people and give them a place to die. There are also families that are poor and do not want to support the elderly, so they carry their elderly parents to a home for the elderly and leave them there.
In short, these are all people in desperate need of help.
After Zhu Yuyan received the letter, she could not sleep well for several nights. When Su Chunjun realized it, he comforted her, “One person can’t save the whole world, so don’t be too hard on yourself. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Just do what you can.”
Zhu Yuyan smiled miserably and said, “No, this is actually the lifeboat dilemma. Should I save more people that I see, or save those with a greater likelihood of survival?”
Previously, she was thinking of trying to rescue as many of the ordinary people in this city as possible, to help them hang on and get through this difficult time, and maybe some of them would have a chance of surviving, of living and surviving to the end.
In fact, she had already made her choice at this point. She had chosen the people who were more likely to survive.
But now that even more miserable people had appeared in front of her, if she didn’t help them, then they would probably die the next moment. But if she helped them and money was spent on these people, then there might not be any way to buy food for the next set of famines.
Is it better to feed a healthy person to live longer, or to give medicine to a person who has been sick for a long time to save his life?
There is simply no answer to such questions.
Zhu Yuyan went to these places anyway. She visited the elementary school, Tzu Chi Institutes and homes for the elderly that asked her for help, and found that the situation was even worse than what was written in the letter.
The people at the Tzu Chi Home said, “Every day there are children who die, and we don’t have time to bury them. We can’t even afford to pay for the Health Bureau’s body truck to come here, and we can’t afford to pay for the cremation fee either. Now we can only carry the bodies of our children to the garbage factory and bury them in the garbage. We also can’t afford to clean the bedsheets, all the children now sleep in two or three together in one bed, and sometimes they even have to stay for a few days with their little ones who are already dead.”
The smell in the CCH is very foul and unpleasant, a stench that is a mixture of many odors.
The children were not too old, many infants, but also many children of three, four, four or five years old, who were hiding in corners or sitting on the floor, with a little bit of innocence and a little bit of timidity in their gaze.
We need everything,” said the man from the Tzu Chi Home. Money, food, clothes, medicine, anything, we haven’t gotten donations for a long time.”
Zhu Yuyan’s eyes were red and incredibly calm as she said, “I may not be able to give you much.”
The man from the Tzu Chi Home didn’t look particularly disappointed, and he was calm.
Zhu Yuyan: “I can probably only give you guys some potatoes.”
The man let out a huge sigh of relief, and joked lightly, as if a large part of the burden on his body had been removed all of a sudden: “Are they American potatoes?”
Zhu Yuyan also laughed a little, “I don’t know where they came from. It’s fine if you can eat them.”
The man nodded heavily, “As long as it’s edible.”
Zhu Yuyan: “The drug is completely unable to find a way right now. I don’t have a doorway in this area and I don’t know any hospitals. I can find some fabrics that you can cut into clothes or sheets.”
The man: “Thank you, you have already helped a lot. Thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
In the end, Zhu Yuyan sent potatoes, explaining that he would send them every month from now on. There was also the Hirata family’s fabric, which she pulled straight from the charity night market.
There were also fifty-five boxes of fruit candies.
This was the first factory opened by the merchant who followed Mr. Zhang.
Surprisingly, it was a sugar factory.
Zhu Yuyan immediately went to the door in the name of the charity foundation, asked for donations, and turned around and gave them to the Tzu Chi Institution and the elementary school.
When you don’t have medicine, have a candy.