Freely give and you shall also receive

Today is Palm Sunday, and I am writing this blog from Jerusalem. I have long wanted to come here and visit the Holy Land. I’m not particularly religious, but coming on this pilgrimage felt like something I had long wanted to do. It has been a challenge. The conflict has not gone away, even on a weekend like this one. I have been surprised at how real the differences are and how they get played out. Although I do have Jewish ancestry, on my mother’s side, I’m not Jewish. If it counts, I did once have a small flock of pedigree Jacob sheep that were registered under the name of Gold-a Meir. For younger readers of this blog, Golda was the fourth and only female Israeli Prime Minister. She was often compared with Margaret Thatcher, the first UK female PM. All that said, I have felt a huge connection to the place and the people. 

Of course, it wasn’t just me in our house who wanted to come to Israel. It has been a lifetime’s ambition for J too. We have both had three places on our list of places to visit - the Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu, and the Holy Land. I have now done two of these, and Machu Picchu is still there waiting to be conquered. I have no doubt we will eventually do all three together. I will come back to our Israeli trip next week when I have reflected more on my experience, but first I do want to return to last week’s blog and my mention of Audrey Tang.

Audrey was a keynote speaker at the Stronger Things 2022 conference organised by the New Local organisation. She was a sensational presenter. Audrey was born in 1981. She was a child prodigy. By the time she was 5 years old, she had consumed most works of classical literature, had conquered mathematics by the age of six, and started computer programming aged just 8 years old. She learnt Perl at the age of 12. 

If like me you don’t know what Perl is, it is a computer programming language, that is immensely difficult to learn. It is often referred to as the ‘duct tape’ that holds the internet together. By 2000, aged 19, Audrey had held many positions in Silicon Valley as a digital entrepreneur. She was very successful. Returning to Taiwan, she became a core member of G0v (pronounced gov zero) which is a largely anonymous collective of digital technology designers, programmers and activists. Apple and Microsoft they’re not, and as a group, they genuinely believe in freely sharing open source software for the wider good.

In late 2005 Audrey began transitioning to a female, which included changing her Chinese and English names. She became involved in Taiwanese politics during the Sunflower Student Movement demonstrations of 2014. It was the start of great things. She helped the students, as they occupied the parliament buildings, to communicate their messages online. This so impressed the Prime Minister at the time, that he invited Audrey to build a media literacy programme for Taiwan’s schools. In 2016 she was appointed Minster without Portfolio for digital affairs. She was just 35 and the youngest member of the cabinet. In 2019, Audrey identified herself as being ‘post-gender’ or ‘non-binary’, becoming the first transgender member of the government. Her position, knowledge and attitude to life, would stand Taiwan in good stead when the Covid pandemic arrived in 2020.

Remarkably, in the two years of the pandemic, Taiwan had just 24,033 infections and 853 Coronavirus-related deaths. Compare that to the UK which has seen nearly over 21.4 million infections and 17,000 Covid-related deaths in the same period. Audrey and G0v, using shared open software solutions, developed a world-beating tracing system (which didn’t need a £37 billion budget either) that used a QR code system which required everyone to scan their location wherever they went. Every time. In the event of an outbreak of community infections, public health professionals could retrace an individual’s movements and require anyone who may have been in contact with the infected individual to quarantine. It was a massive task, only made possible because of the very low case rates; that and the population’s acceptance of such governmental surveillance and intervention. Audrey described how during the pandemic, there was a growing shared sense of self-preservation and also social solidarity.

G0v programmes were also used in managing the vaccination programme, tackling Covid misinformation, and are now very much in the front line of dealing with new variant outbreaks. They have got track and tracing down from 24 hours to 24 minutes!

Finally, let me bring you back to Israel, and J and my Holy Land Pilgrimage. As I noted above, whilst I need time to process our experience, there are some in the moment thoughts I can share. Our first hotel stood on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. We were able to visit the ruins of Capernaum, and stand on the Mount of Beatitudes (where Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount). Yesterday we were in Bethlehem  and saw the very place that its said Mary gave birth to Jesus. It wasn’t a great experience. Today we are in Jerusalem, and our hotel is just a couple minutes’ walk away from the Damascus Gate, which is the main entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem. The Old City is a fascinating place. To walk though, something weJ did yesterday evening. On this Palm Sunday, we will join the procession from the Mount of Olives to that Old City, and we have our palm fronds ready! 

Israel also managed the pandemic well. It has a superb public health infrastructure, including probably the best and most comprehensive electronic medical record system in the world. They have the highest life expectancy in the world, at almost 83 years. Their health care system is the result of sustained investment over the past 70 years. Like many other countries, the Israeli health care system benefits from highly skilled health care professionals (and there’re more of them per head of population than in the UK). Using this resource, they very effectively used vaccinations much earlier than other countries to limit the impact of Covid. Whilst perhaps they’ve not been quite as successful as Taiwan*, Israel’s death rate is less than 11,000 Covid-related deaths during the entire pandemic.

Both Taiwan and Israel continue to effectively use new digital technologies (in different ways) to both support health care interventions, and to communicate and engage with their populations. Both countries have high levels of social cohesion and utilise community power well to bring about change. This brings us back to that Stronger Things presentation I liked so much. When Audrey was asked if there was just one thing that she would like to leave us all with, she said, yes, and it was something from her favourite (and mine too) song writer, Leonard Cohen. I thought her answer was perceptively apposite to both dealing with the pandemic, and maybe also to resolving the conflict in Israel and elsewhere too. 

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

 

 

*Comparisons are always difficult, but even where population controls are used, Taiwan and Israel have done better than the UK, US and many other European countries regarding Covid mortality.