Life in Christchurch

As time rolls on, and it is now one month exactly after the earthquake which shook Christchurch to its knees, metaphorically and literally!

How does the recovery progress? Slowly. In every city there is the main central business district, the business hub of the city, along with shops, cafes, and restaurants of every description. Well, ours is now a disaster zone, yet even within that zone stand buildings that are perfectly fine, but cannot open for business because of all that is around them.

The work progressed in stages, first, the desperate search to find survivors, then the search to recover bodies, on to demolishing highly unstable and dangerous buildings. Amidst all that the desperate work to get electricity working again, water flowing, and sewerage systems working – all of which were seriously damaged in the earthquake.

What we face now is the possibility of more buildings that will need to be demolished, others that are repairable, and yet others that are at risk because of the neighbouring buildings. We have streets where the front/facades of the buildings/shops crumbled onto the footpath and road. We have hills where one house may collapse onto the one below, which may in turn collapse onto the one below.

Our CBD is littered with mounds of rubble, and severely damaged buildings.

Some of our suburbs look like a Salvador Dali painting, with not a single building completely upright or undamaged.

Some of our suburbs look like the beach came to town.

Many roads stretched and pulled apart.

As a fairly good guess, I would have to say that there is not a single street in Christchurch that is a level as it used to be. You drive not just watching traffic but watching to see the state of the road ahead of you.

The physical recovery of our city is going to be a very long term recovery. What is unrepairable needs to be demolished. What is repairable needs to be repaired. Collapsed buildings, demolished buildings, piles of rubble, all need to be cleared away. But there are only so many people, and there are only so many hours in a day…and it is going to take a long time…a long long time.

The questions we ask are:

Will there be anything left in the CBD at all?

Will the damaged suburbs be complete wastelands?

We ask these questions of ourselves, inwardly, because no one can answer. We don’t know how long anything will take. We still have suburbs with no working sewerage systems, and no running water.

And so we do the only thing we can do, we keep breathing, and we keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Life here is not the same as it was, we think differently, we are ready to flee in a single moment, and we live at a very heightened level. But, the wonderful thing has been the spirit of humanity, that wonderful community spirit that has risen amongst us. Let that continue.

We are in this together. And we will continue to support each other to the best of our ability in whatever ways we can. We all have strengths, we all have something to share, we all have skills to offer.

In the most painful of days, a simple smile can be the light that lifts the world.

There are words that have come to mean a lot over the last month in Christchurch, and they are:

RISE UP CHRISTCHURCH

and

KIA KAHA  (be strong)

To all of my fellow Cantabrians…Kia Kaha

Arohanui

Robyn