Islander gets caught in SARS outbreak

Roger Kanchuk figured his first trip to China would be an adventure. He didn’t know that the adventure would land him in the epicenter of the SARS epidemic. “I wanted to experience Asia,” Kanchuk said. “I went as a ‘life-path change.’” A Bainbridge school bus driver, Kanchuk was hired by the Shenzhen Education Bureau to teach English to third-graders in Shenzhen, a city in the south coastal China province of Guangdong.

Roger Kanchuk figured his first trip to China would be an adventure.

He didn’t know that the adventure would land him in the epicenter of the SARS epidemic.

“I wanted to experience Asia,” Kanchuk said. “I went as a ‘life-path change.’”

A Bainbridge school bus driver, Kanchuk was hired by the Shenzhen Education Bureau to teach English to third-graders in Shenzhen, a city in the south coastal China province of Guangdong.

More than 1 million Chinese live in the hub of land and water trade between Hong Kong and Guangzhou, the city to which early cases of the acute respiratory ailment would be traced.

In August 2002, Kanchuk traveled to Beijing with a group of 50 would-be teachers who, like himself had enrolled in a Ball State University program to teach English as a second language. The group spent three weeks at Beijing University undergoing intensive teacher training.

In Shenzhen, he settled into teaching his 45 students – an average class size for Chinese primary grades.

“I loved it,” Kanchuk said. “I just loved working with the kids. It’s a real thrill finding the ones who love to learn – maybe five in the class.”

His students taught him the rudiments of their tongue.

Like most Chinese teachers, Kanchuk lived in school-provided housing. His 500-square-foot apartment featured two bed-rooms and a combination bathroom-shower he found exotic.

The apartment had two Western features, a toilet and a television with cable access. Kanchuk could watch several English-speaking channels from Hong Kong.

In mid-February, he viewed news reports of a new and virulent respiratory illness in Hong Kong. But despite being issued a surgical mask in which to teach his classes, Kanchuk heard no word of local cases, and the reports were soon eclipsed by the Iraq war.

“Every morning I had a choice of Dan Rather or Pete Jennings,” he said. “It would be 7:30 a.m. Tuesday in China, but I would be watching Monday evening news in the United States.”

Otherwise, Kanchuk’s major worry was how to stay warm in the cold classrooms.

Then in late March, CBS news aired a two-minute segment about the SARS explosion in Hong Kong. The report alluded to cases in China and the exclusion of the World Health Organization from Beijing.

“It really seems, in retrospect, that as soon as the news started to pick up about SARS on NBC, CBS and CNN that we started to see it in the local English version of the Shenzhen Daily,” Kanchuk said.

The focus of local news outlets, however, was on SARS in Hong Kong and Toronto.

“All we were told was, ‘you better not visit Toronto,’” Kanchuk said. “There was not one word about Guangzhou.”

The teachers were inclined to dismiss cautionary emails from stateside friends. The private joke among them was: If 110 people in Shenzhen died in auto accidents every month, why worry about the flu?

“I would call my daughter and she would say ‘Dad, you need to come home, there’s SARS there, it’s dangerous,’” Kanchuk said. “We never had that feeling for the longest time.”

The Chinese populace had its own form of denial, Kanchuk says, fingering Hong Kong as the locus of the problem.

Soon after, he took a day trip there and read a front-page story in Wall Street Journal Asia on an alleged Chinese government cover-up of the growing epidemic.

“They also said this started in a small village out of Guangdong. I recognized that, for sure,” Kanchuk said.

When he posted the article online for the other teachers to read, the group became disquieted for the first time. Their unease turned to fear when the WHO finally was allowed into China and began to post epidemic data on the Internet.

After a Chinese doctor at a military hospital blew the whistle on the cover-up, many of the teachers began to seriously consider returning home.

The Chinese, Kanchuk says, were now frightened as well.

“The school was passing out tea to everyone,” he said. “They thought if you drank a certain kind of herbal tea, you wouldn’t get SARS.”

Kanchuck’s brand of prevention was pragmatic. “I washed my hands all the time,” he said.

When Kanchuk visited Hong Kong in May, nearly three-quarters of the population was masked. But he had learned that the paper gauze was ineffectual.

It was after 11 members of a theater company that had just appeared in Shenzhen fell ill with SARS that the city went into a panic, he said.

“You’d hear loudspeaker trucks driving the streets announcing that anyone who’d attended a performance should register with the police,” Kanchuk said.

Kanchuk’s worst moment was learning that, among a construction crew working on a building a few feet from his open bedroom window, there was a man sick with SARS.

The end of his Chinese teaching stint came when an American teacher – at a school just four miles away from his own – died.

Afraid to risk another American death, the Shenzhen Education Bureau cancelled the contracts of all the teachers from the States.

Kanchuk stopped teaching on May 5; he and others in the group had to wait until May 12 for tickets out, and inter-province travel was shut down altogether.

“We met for coffee, we met for lunch, we met for dinner,” he said.

The group puzzled over the fact that the schools remained opened, even the school where the American had died.

“The thing that amazed the most of us was that the government had covered up the outbreak in Quangdong since November 2002,” Kanchuk said.

But some Chinese he talked to were less surprised. As one Chinese friend told him with a shrug: “We don’t always believe everything that’s reported by the government.”