Two weeks after
Two weeks and we are still displaced. I was up at the house on Monday after a community meeting and the windows have still not been fixed, though the glazier has measured up for them. Still there are a lot of windows to reglaze and I assume that we will get done one of these days. There is no point getting upset about it, this is just too big and there are only a certain number of tradesmen to go around.
Also we are in the now small percentage (about 2%) of Christchurch residents who have no power. The cables up the Hill took a real battering. Trying to locate these cable faults takes a long time. The suburbs are also covered in Chorus vans who are searching for all the breaks in the phone cables, although luckily, this is one thing that we have when we are at the house....now being proud possessors of a plug in phone!!!!The electricity company cannot give us a timescale as each cable break is taking about 12 hours to fix.
The hill top reservoirs are filling, so we are hopeful that one day soon we will be able to turn on a tap in the house and clear nectar will come from the tap. You cannot understand, until it is not there, how much we take flushing toilets and the ability to wash our hands with clean running water for granted. Honestly this is a true gift. Hand sanitiser may kill bugs but it does not make your hands feel clean.
Luckily though our house has minimal damage and has amazed the builder with how few problems it has in the middle of the earthquake zone. For that we are truly thankful. It is home, we may not own it, but we are desperate to get back to it, get it clean and straightened out and feel that we are home again. Our friends have been really really good. I didn't expect to be at J's for so long, but she is happy for me to stay as long as it takes. It is at times like this that you are so thankful for your good friends, and whilst we may not have known people for long, they have been wonderful.
The school starts again on Monday. They have power, water and hopefully sewage. I think that we will have to send the boys to school with drinking water and lunch...and I will pack a hand sanitiser in for them...but they will be back with their teachers and friends. They have both done well in the local school up north that they are currently attending, C is top of his class and his teacher is calling him"Wonderboy"! L just loves the laid back attitude of the school. However I will be glad to see them both again. I fly up to Nelson on Friday afternoon and we return on Sunday, together.
My OH has had a good time in the north, and tells me that the area is beautiful. I am looking forward to being reunited with him at the end of this week and seeing a small part of the coast. The earthquake brought about the separation we had tried so hard to avoid during this emigration experience. At least we will soon all be together again.
The aftershocks continue. Mind you, we have had them for most of our time in NZ...it was only for the first two months here that there were none. It can be a bit disconcerting just before bedtime as adrenalin courses back into your system, as you wait for a second to see what will develop...and it does tend to wreck your sleep. Most of us are wandering around in a zombie type state, with travel trunks beneath our eyes. Sleep is another thing that is hard to come by easily at the moment, a bit like all the other things we take for granted in life.
People express surprise that we are staying. We chose this city though, we made it a home, I have employment and it will be beautiful again. I also wonder what it would say about us as human beings, if, having made this decision to come and settle, we ran away when the going got tough due to the earthquake. I know, that for some, they will go and it will be the right decision for them. But I think that you have to have had an underlying dis-ease with where you were and what you were doing, to want to run. Some said that they were going initially but then have or will be returning.
This Friday I hope to attend the memorial service in Hagley Park. It will be very hard. I hope to attend with a box of tissues in hand and the ever present bottle of water. I will remember those that are no longer here, the things that have gone and the painful rebirth that this city will have to endure. There is a new normality here, for those of us who stay. Nothing will be the same again.
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