A personal comment

We were fortunate to find ourselves in Christchurch for the latter part of Show Week and were generously hosted during two days by Margaret Reeve and Ross Skinner.  During this time we were shown around the city and had a brief look at many aspects of how the earthquakes had affected the city.  Like most outside of Christchurch we had learned about much of what we saw in the media but nothing prepared us for seeing the devastation ‘first hand’.  Frankly we were stunned and think anyone would be.   

The RESTART shopping area
Note the carpark building behind awaiting demolition

It is one thing to see media snapshots of houses damaged and abandoned but another to drive down street after street with house after house destroyed and only the occasional resident “hanging on”. Or even in the least affected suburbs to see all too frequently gaps in the landscape and continuous loss of chimneys, fences and occasionally a wall off a building – and know this is just what was readily visible.  The sheer scale of the buildings coming down in the CBD is staggering let along the size of most of these buildings.  Just mind blowing.

Then to see the Restart (container) shopping area – the ingenuity just blew us away.  Likewise how displaced businesses have managed to move to other parts of the city and get going again. We truly hope no other part of NZ has to go through this sort of experience in the future.  It is clear that support for Christchurch is going to be needed long-term for the city ... and its people.  What is being achieved by Rotary (and many other groups) is incredible and despite an immense amount of activity it appears the need has hardly been dented due to its scale. We could only marvel at the spirit of all we met, their resilience and determination to make the best of their situation.

-          Colin and Beryl Robinson