Red cross, rugby and the seven billion

Let’s hear it for the nurses prepared to risk their lives for the sake of others.

During the week I went to Government House for the investiture of a friend’s brother, Andrew Cameron, with the Florence Nightingale Medal, of which just 50 are awarded to nurses worldwide every two years. It was the 25th time the medal had gone to a New Zealander.

If you made a list of destinations for the holiday from hell, it’s those places in which he has been nursing in recent years, including stints with the Red Cross in Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Ossetia and Sudan. Basically, if it’s war-torn, corrupt, dysfunctional and a place where it’s hard to find a glass of drinking-quality water let alone a cold beer, he and other aid workers have been there.

It is not what most of us think of when we’re young and say we want a job that involves travel. He is about to leave for Afghanistan again, this time working for the other side, essentially the Taliban, since the Red Cross takes seriously its position of political neutrality. He gave a nice speech at the investiture, then we guests took the opportunity to look around the public rooms at Government House to admire how our taxes had been spent on its renovation.

I couldn’t help but think the aesthetics would have been enhanced by removing the obligation to display cases of gifts from overseas heads of state – the kinds of things you presumably have to keep out in case the VIPs drop in again. Pity diplomacy means we can’t sell the more ostentatious ones and donate the money to the Red Cross.

With some regret we have just taken down the Rugby World Cup bunting that has fluttered from the front of our house for the past six weeks. I will miss the small bright flags cheerily flicking back and forth in the wind, and even briefly considered making my own bunting out of political party logos as a substitute decoration in the run-up to the election, before quickly discarding the idea.

In the absence of rugby, the public might start paying more attention to politics, but it feels a little too soon for another gladiatorial contest. Still, the election is unlikely to induce the same degree of nervous tension as that anxiety-filled RWC final, because the election is merely a matter of deciding who governs the nation for the next three years, and not something important like finding the winner of the Webb Ellis Cup.

It seems unlikely anyone will watch the election on a big screen in the local pub. That’s partly because MMP has dulled the winner-takes-all effect, so on election night it’s as though the crowd at the rugby voted for the winner at the end of the match and got a World Cup team that consisted of the All Blacks backs, with the French front row, an Australian winger and a Welsh centre, with no one exactly sure whose game plan to follow for the season.

With the nominal seven billionth person set to be born about the end of October (guess Niger, Pakistan or China for his or her country of birth), it’s time we came up with a new vocabulary for exceptionally large numbers. A billion is a thousand million, and a trillion is a thousand billion. Astronomers and people who study atoms have always worked in these numbers, usually expressed as mathematical equations. But now that US Government debt is about US$14 trillion, these words are starting to trip off the tongues of the rest of us – and they’re also beginning to sound like nothing too serious.

If there are only 14 of something, it doesn’t seem too bad (unless you’re Welsh and a rugby player in the World Cup). Perhaps the seven billionth child could be given the role of creating a new word, especially for debt of a hundred billion dollars, as a stepping stone between a billion and a trillion.

Which reminds me of an old joke I hope I may be excused for retelling. When George W Bush was president, his aides informed him seven Brazilians had been killed in Iraq. “That’s shocking news,” he said, “but it’s the terrible price we have to pay for democracy and freedom. Just remind me again, how many is a Brazilian?”