For such a time as this - post 16

Friday, April 10 – Good Friday

Our supermarket was open, so I used the opportunity to walk there and get some fresh air – between the latter rain showers. All the shoppers were wearing facial masks, even the orthodox ones, so there is an improvement here!

Shabbat, April 11

Our ‘regular’ daily schedule is a bit like this:

Wim usually wakes up at 6 a.m. Reads his Bible and prays until I show up at 7.30 a.m. Thankfully, we sleep well, but both dream a lot – the craziest things. While Wim goes outside to pick up the paper (on a regular day) and starts reading it, I go through my emails, whatsapps and whatever else, and check the on-line breaking news from Times of Israel and the Jerusalem Post. 
A few times a day I check the Hopkins University Corona site-  https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

At the moment, the USA is still on the # 1 spot, followed by Spain and Italy. Even though the number of infected people is still rising, Israel still has a low number of deaths and a growing number of recovered patients.

It’s encouraging to read about universities using robots to assist the medical personnel in hospitals, or doctors successfully treating critically ill patients with a placenta-based medicine – with amazing results.

Or about the ‘adopt a doctor’ project - https://www.timesofisrael.com/israelis-looking-out-for-overworked-healthcare-professionals/  

In less than three weeks, more than 10,000 have signed up to “Adopt A Doc.” Besides providing needed protective gear and other medical supplies, an army of volunteers has carried out grocery shopping, delivered home cooked meals, babysat for children and even walked the pets of health care providers.

a website that pairs volunteers with nearby doctors, nurses and other overworked medical personnel. Nearly 1,000 now have a designated volunteer who cares for their personal needs, including finding them parking spots in crowded urban centers when they return home from late shifts. Some 3,000 other volunteers offer support in other ways. 
The grassroots organization now has a coordinator at every hospital in the country, has secured donations from private catering companies and its lobbying effort with local municipalities has produced various gestures toward the doctors. Seeing the medical teams in Italy and in China, they wanted to make sure that the Israeli medical teams are taken care of, all their personal lives are taken care of so they can really focus only on being professional and at their best in the hospitals.

Being home these days with nothing to do, the volunteers now feel like they are part of something, and able to help in a constructive way.

Tomorrow is Resurrection Day – there will be no church service, but a woman in our congregation tries to organize a Sunrise service at 6 a.m. through Zoom, which we haven’t installed yet. On Sunday morning, the Garden Tomb usually has a Sunrise service at 6 a.m. that many believers and tourists in Jerusalem attend.  But after such an early start, most of them were too sleepy to attend a regular church service! We used to organize a Passover breakfast at our church, which was always a lot of preparations, and we never knew how many people would show up. I’m glad we stopped doing that a few years ago!

The latter rains (yesterday and today we had a lot of showers) have been amazing this year, and the Sea of Galilee is only a few centimeters short of being full! The water level is now 209.07 meters below sea level, 0.27 meters below the upper red line threshold (208.9 meters below sea level). 
The sea is currently at the highest level it's been since 2004.