The Girl Who Couldn’t Wait To Get Out Of The Place – Sarah de Heer

The Girl Who Couldn’t Wait To Get Out Of The Place Sarah de Heer

And Kindness Lay All About

Stories from the Christchurch Earthquakes

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Glenn Busch

Sarah de Heer

Everyone had been telling me you can’t go there, you won’t have this, you won’t have that, you won’t have the other, but it wasn’t true. Going

to London was absolutely amazing and without a doubt the best thing I had ever done in my life. Terrifying and exciting and something that

had to be done, I needed to get out; I was in a very unwell state here, just really unhappy and it was absolutely the best thing that I could have done at that time. It was when I knew for certain I was capable of doing those sorts of things for myself, that I didn’t need to rely on other

people. It let me find out who I was, something I think I struggled with as a child. Coming from a big family, a small town, and expected to be a certain type of person, I never really knew who I was. By going to the

other side of the world I could all of a sudden be anyone. It gave me the chance to be me.

Meeting Anthonie was quite coincidental. I’d moved into a flat that

I was sharing with an Australian girl and her boyfriend. He was a

friend of Anthonie’s—in fact they had come to London together some

time before—so that was the connection, that was how we met, mutual friends. By then I’d been in the city about eighteen months and I was

getting ready to come home when we came upon one another. After that everything changed—got turned upside down, as it does—and

I decided to stay on just to see how things would go. By the time we

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arrived in New Zealand some years later we were married. It was as easy as that.

We always knew that London was never going to be the place to

start a family; it wasn’t that kind of environment. It’s not that we weren’t

both happy there but as soon as you start throwing children into the

mix it’s a bit different. Also, being a teacher and having taught over

there I didn’t want to have a bar of the education system at that time, not with my own children, and so we decided to come back. We got

married one January, in South Africa, and then it was back to London

for another eight months so we could save the money for a deposit on a house. It was going to be either New Zealand or South Africa and South Africa at that time was in the sort of political situation that

meant Anthonie was pretty much unemployable. His brother had gone

back and it took him seven or eight months to get a job. We decided we would give New Zealand a go.

He had never been here so it was quite a big move for him and

because of that we decided to settle in Wellington. That would give

us enough distance from my family so that it felt like we were going somewhere neutral. I didn’t want it to seem like it was easy for me

and difficult for him, this way it kind of put us both on an even playing field.

Wellington was great. We loved it. Probably we’d still be there

now if it weren’t for the fact that Theo was born and we had no one

there to really help us with him. Theo was always going to need a huge amount of support and it was difficult for us to do that alone, it’s why we worked on coming back down here. There were other advantages

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to the shift as well; it meant that the kids could have a relationship with their grandparents as well as my sister and their two cousins. No one thought about earthquakes then. Even if we had, moving out of

Wellington might have been seen as the smart option. What is it they say about hindsight—never mind, we thought it was the right decision

at the time and it was. Being around my family has certainly made things a lot easier.

I was actually down staying with my parents in September when the

first earthquake arrived. It crept up on us in the middle of the night.

I heard it first, that deep throbbing rumble, it woke me up. The house

is not that far from the railway and you do hear the trains coming through—people often say they thought it was a train don’t they—but I knew immediately what was coming and it wasn’t a train.

I leapt from the bed and threw myself over Theo. Somewhere in the

back of my mind I knew that Codie was going to be fine, he was in his cot and I knew he wasn’t going to get shaken out of bed.

It’s probably the noises that stay with you more than anything else.

In my parents’ house they had a china cabinet right outside our door

and a lot of the glass was falling and breaking on the floor, I think it was the sound of that glass smashing and the constant rumble that seemed to go on and on and on that worried me the most. I didn’t give

a thought at all to Anthonie, which is not very good because he was

by himself in Christchurch and I know he would be thinking of me.

When it’s happening though and you’ve got your kids beside you, your immediate concern is always going to be for them. That’s what fills your head up at that moment.

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Ironically, Theo was the one person in the house who didn’t wake

up. After it finally stopped I remember looking around the room and thinking right, Theo is okay, he’s asleep. Codie was starting to grizzle

and cry, he was only about fifteen months old then so he was quite young and obviously he had no idea what was going on. My father

came in and asked if we were okay. He told us everybody was all right

and then he set about cleaning up that the broken glass and the rest of the mess.

I think my mum was quite shaken with the whole thing. She had

a work colleague, Judith, staying with us in the house and she was the

only one who’d got out of bed and under a doorway, I don’t think the

rest of us had even thought about that. Mind you, she’s from Wellington so I guess that’s kind of ingrained; they’re all highly trained up there

aren’t they. Being down in Rakaia the power was still with us and in a

way, knowing that you could actually see what was going on made the aftermath a lot easier.

Later we finally got to speak with Anthonie who told us there were

a lot of problems around our home. Liquefaction was everywhere and the state of Retreat Road was very bad—it was gone really—and there were a bunch of other things that made the decision for us to stay where we were fairly straightforward.

We were there for about two weeks, until we knew that the water

was back on and the power was okay. Anthonie got down to see us whenever he could get away from work and dealing with what was happening in Christchurch. There were the aftershocks to contend

with as well and after him telling me of his experience with the bed

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shaking and not being able to get out and all the rest of it, we thought Rakaia was probably a safer place to be with the kids.

Of course our biggest concern was obviously with Theo and his

quite high medical needs. With his tracheostomy and so on we wanted to keep out of rubble and the dust and all the other things around

those aftershocks that people were worried about. We didn’t want to be dealing with all that and trying to keep him safe as well.

When we did finally arrive back home I was a little bit nervous.

I hadn’t been here for the big shake or any of the aftershocks and so

I didn’t know what to expect. Things had seemed to calm a bit down however so after a reasonably short period I was actually feeling all

right about being here. In fact, once I’d experienced my first decent

sized aftershock in the house—once I knew what that was like—I was fine. I could do this. And although my parents had been fantastic—are

fantastic—and have been very supportive with Theo and Codie, for Anthonie and I to be back together again as a family was really good.

There were more aftershocks, but what the experts were saying was

that we needed to expect a reasonable amount of this, and yes there will be some quite big ones. Then on Boxing Day that year there was

another actual earthquake. With it came more cracks in the house

though not so much in the way of liquefaction. Not in September and not in that particular one either. Not in our immediate area, but just a

street or two over, in Keller Street and Retreat Road, sadly there was a lot of it going on.

In both those earthquakes, compared to those quite close to us, we

had been okay and I think that kind of lulled me into feeling secure on

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our own little patch of land. And so yeah, I wasn’t overly concerned

about things after September or Boxing Day. But then came February, that day in February in which everything changed.

That morning the kids and I had been out in Sumner. Theo goes to

the van Asch, Deaf Education Centre there twice a week and Tuesday morning is the preschool group session. Theo, Codie and myself were

out there that morning and finished at our usual time, about midday,

and it must have been about twelve thirty by the time we got home.

Codie, as he always does, fell asleep in the car and so when we got

there I picked him up and put him in his bed, everything was fine.

Theo and I had been chatting a bit and then I went into the kitchen

to get some lunch. I’d left him watching some Mickey Mouse on TV

and I was actually talking on the phone to our speech and language therapist up at the Auckland Starship Hospital when I heard it. Just like before, I heard it coming… I felt the bang and then the shaking

began. I could hear myself screaming down the phone at her, ‘My God, my God!’ and then the phone went dead. The power, everything cut

out straight away and I managed to get in here, straight to Theo. He was sitting there on the black chair and it was a completely different

experience from any of the other ones. The whole room looked like it was twisting.

As I ran from the kitchen an old kauri mantelpiece we had bought

and were going to attach to the wall fell and missed the back of my

foot by a few centimetres and I keep thinking what if it had hit me, what damage would it have done and how would I have coped with the kids. Theo had no idea at all what was happening. As I was holding

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him I could hear the crashing and banging of plates and the glasses as they flew around all over. It was that same sound flooding back again

only worse and this time I had my children in different parts of the

house. One downstairs, one upstairs and that did not feel good. That was really quite bad.

I need to keep the children safe—that was my only thought.

Everything we were taught as kids, to get under doorways and so on,

that just goes out the window when you’ve got your own children.

Once again I threw myself over him so that he wasn’t going to get

thrown off the chair. I knew Codie was in his cot again so I was thinking, hopefully, he’s not been thrown out of bed and that I just have to stay here and wait for this to stop. When it stops, then I can act.

Finally it did and Theo was upset because Mickey Mouse was no

longer there. He had disappeared along with the power. I’d said to him, ‘That was a really big wobble,’ but Mickey Mouse seemed to be his chief concern. I didn’t have any choice then but to leave him in the

chair—making sure there was nothing that could fall on him—and go to get Codie.

A bookshelf at the top of the stairs had tipped over and books were

all over the stairs and I couldn’t get past—I had to clear a path to get to him. I remember thinking this is going to take too long and so I had to come back and get Theo. With him in one arm I began clearing

a path again to Codie who was right at the other end of the house.

When I finally got into his room he was saying, ‘Close the doors, close the doors,’ all of his cupboard doors had opened and that was what he

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was worried about. He didn’t seem so concerned about the shaking, he certainly wasn’t screaming or crying, nothing like that. I think perhaps he was young enough for it not to really have a huge impact.

While I’m standing there in his room thinking about all this

there was another big aftershock, God, okay, what the hell do I do now. I’m upstairs—is upstairs the best place to be? Am I better to be

downstairs? I need to phone Anthonie. So, I put Theo in the cot with

Codie, thinking that was the safest place for them to be. I look around the room and there is no cracking, no windows broken, everything

seemed okay. I ran into my bedroom over everything that was now on the floor and picked up the phone. Shit, what am I doing? I was just

talking on the phone when it happened, I heard it cut off, what’s wrong with me? Okay, I need to get my mobile. Right, that’s downstairs, so do I go down and get it or do I come back and get the kids and go down

with them? I really was in a bit of a state, confused and perhaps a little

bit of panic because I didn’t really know what the best thing was to do.

In the end I picked up both the boys and somehow, I don’t know quite how, negotiated my way back down the stairs with both of them, got

my mobile phone from the kitchen and then came back into the front room.

There was glass, there was all sorts of broken things in here, but

when I looked around the TV hadn’t fallen, nothing else had fallen and I figured this was probably the safest place to be. There were a lot more aftershocks but neither of the boys were upset or crying or hysterical or anything like that. They didn’t really know what was going on and I

just kept saying it’s okay, it’s okay, just another wobble, and meanwhile

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my heart is pounding in my chest, ka-boom, ka-boom, ka-boom, and I’m thinking be calm, be calm. Ha, be calm! Then I look out the window

towards the driveway and see the liquefaction coming up through it

and I’m thinking what the hell is that? And then after a few beats I

realised what it was, and I could hear myself saying, ‘Oh no, this is big, this is really big.’

We sat there then. We pretty much didn’t move. Of course, I did

try to phone Anthonie and couldn’t get through. I tried to phone my parents, that didn’t work either. I couldn’t get through to anybody and

I thought the only thing I can do is to wait here until Anthonie comes home. That was my rather feeble plan. Sit tight with the boys and wait

until Anthonie came home. Not even thinking about what was going

on in town or anywhere else, I just thought, our house is safe; it can’t have been that big, so everyone will come home.

At some point I walked outside and looked down the street, saw the

chaos that was Avonside. Our neighbour next door, Philippa, has got

teenage children and they came over when I walked out to the gate.

I said why don’t you guys come on over here. They had some other

teenagers with them, neighbours also, a daughter and teenage son

whose mum hadn’t yet got home so we all milled about in here for a bit. It was good having some other people around during all those big aftershocks.

The kids had written on their door that they were at our place and so

when their mum arrived she came straight over. She’d been working in

town and when she walked in she gave her kids great big hugs and then she said, ‘My god, town’s a mess. Buildings are down, people are dead.’

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My heart just sank. I thought, Anthonie’s in town. I knew the

building he was in—that I thought he was in—Radio Network House, but as it turned out he was in his store in Colombo Street, something

I didn’t know till later. What I did know was that Network House had

suffered a bit of damage in the quakes previously and so I did feel the panic start to rise then. The waiting… the not knowing… it was quite bad. In reality it was only a very short time but in your mind it seemed to go on forever.

I kept looking out the door and holding my breath until finally

I saw him move past the window and I just breathed a massive sigh

of relief. I mean it was complete and utter relief. I’m so glad I hadn’t

known for the whole of that previous time what had happened in town, I’m sure I would have worked myself up into a complete state. When you don’t know, when you’re trying to get in contact and not getting

anything back… having no idea. I was just so very thankful when I actually saw him.

He probably didn’t react like I thought he was going to react, you

know, he gave me a bit of a cuddle and gave the kids a cuddle and then

he was like, right, he wanted to see what was happening out there, wanted to see what was going on and what had happened to the house.

I said to him, ‘Look, you’re here, and now we need to go. We need to pack up the kids and we need to go to my parents’ house.’ That was my

plan. Let’s just get out of Christchurch because I knew that was the safest place to be. And that’s what we did; we made a plan to do that.

The house itself had the usual cracking. Anthonie had had a look

around. There were quite big cracks in the foundations and the whole

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driveway had liquefaction, the garage was full of it and we had liquefaction out to the other side of the house as well. Although the house itself was still standing and we felt safe inside it, obviously we

had no power, we had no water and that was my immediate concern.

It was like we have to get Theo out of here. For him we need to have power, we need things to be clean, and the other thing was I just

wanted to get away from the aftershocks because that was keeping everybody on edge.

It took us a while to get everything we needed into the car. Anthonie

couldn’t get the garage door open because of the liquefaction. He had

to dig it out and then because it’s an electric door opener it wasn’t working, we had to get that pulled up before we could drive the car out. The asphalt of our driveway had collapsed and underneath it there

were big sinkholes that had filled with liquefaction. I didn’t know

what I was driving over. I think we were just lucky we had a fourwheel drive.

We got the kids in the car, we got Theo’s equipment and clothes

and things along with as much other stuff as we could fit in. As we

were leaving we said goodbye to our neighbours across the road, they have three young girls who were looking petrified and I said, ‘Look, we are going to Rakaia, if you want to get out of Christchurch come with

us.’ I gave them the address and said get your kids, get whatever if you need and just come. She rang me about an hour later and said, ‘We’re coming, is it okay if my parents come too?’

‘Of course, absolutely, everybody come, just all come down.’

They all turned up. Five of them and the two parents as well. We

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had twelve people in the house for a week. It was nice having them there because, you know, it was our neighbourhood and we could talk to each other about what was going on.

As we left that day there was a man standing right on the corner

of Retreat and Patten, he had a vest on and looked quite official so I

went up to him and I said, ‘Hi, we need to get out of town, we’re going South, have you heard what’s the best way to go?’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘everything is a mess. There are roads blocked off

everywhere. If I were you I’d go towards the Port Hills and around that way.’

So that’s what we did. And as we drove I’m looking out of the

window and going, oh no. Oh no. Oh my god! Everywhere you looked

there was something down or cars in sinkholes and liquefaction absolutely everywhere.

We got to my parents’ house to find my mum had been away, she

was up at Living Springs running some kind of camp and now they

were all stuck up there. My dad was on his own and didn’t really know what was going on. But with the power still on down there we got to

see a whole lot of what was unfolding on television. On the news we heard that there were still families out at Van Asch because they had

decided to stay for lunch that day and they were now stuck in Sumner.

In the end they’d had to do some treacherous drive with their children

up and over the Port Hills that night and I was just thinking wow, that’s awful, and it could have been me.

After that I wanted to stay in Rakaia for as long as we could. I think

it took about two weeks for them to get power back on to our home

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and that was through a generator in the park. Anthonie was spending time at home and time down at my parents with us. He obviously had

his work things he needed to help sort out and I just kept thinking the longer we can spend in Rakaia the better. We did come up over a couple of days to do a bit of cleaning up but in the end we stayed for

something like five weeks which meant we were missing all the major aftershocks, something I was not unhappy about.

We came back to chemical toilets. We had got hold of one and my

parents had another they gave us, so we were an upstairs, downstairs

sort of house, one on each floor. The kids thought it was brilliant; they were totally excited by it. I wasn’t. I said to Anthonie, ‘Okay, I know that we need chemical toilets but that’s going to be your job. I’ll do

everything else, but that is to be your private domain.’ We had a lot

of laughs with the neighbours about whose job it was going to be.

Philippa next door used to get all gloved up with an apron, a gas mask

and two glasses of wine before she took it on. All of a sudden you found yourself laughing about things that you wouldn’t normally laugh about, and I think that’s what you had to do, you had to find those bits of humour. They were important to us all.

We were lucky to have our neighbour out the back there too. He

even dug out our driveway for us while we were away. He’s been

fantastic, just the person to have in a crisis. He’s got his own generator

and had cords running to everybody for their fridges and freezers.

What a good guy. Before all this we didn’t really know them, I mean we

shared a driveway and we said hello but that was about it. Now—and I think this has happened a lot—the whole dynamic has changed. We’ve

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exchanged phone numbers, they feed our cat if we’re away, and there is another thing they kindly help with, when Anthonie is away for work

and I’m at home by myself I let them know and they are really good

about that. The weird thing is I never worried about being at home by myself before but now I actually get quite scared, quite anxious when I’m in the house with the kids by myself.

Perhaps it’s about what has happened to our area, how everything

has got so very quiet around here. On Retreat Road there were always

cars, it was always a busy kind of area—things going on day and night— but now, at night, with so many people gone, it is almost eerie. Today

when we walk the dog around the river there are probably only three or four houses we go past that are still being lived in. It unnerves me

a little when you hear stories of burglaries and people looting houses around here now. Especially when you know that your house isn’t as

secure as it once was—we’ve had to put on extra locks because the

doors don’t shut properly anymore. So yeah, every little sound I hear, especially at night, it would just… it would make me start—what’s

that noise? Is that someone? But then you get used to anything after a

while don’t you. I think… yeah, that feeling has definitely eased as the earthquakes and aftershocks have lessened.

We got rid of the chemical toilets in June. We had the sewerage

back on for a whole week before the June earthquakes took it out again.

Two earthquakes in one day. I was at the preschool down on Woodham Road for that one. It was quite awful but I was really glad I was there

with the children. Obviously, there were a lot of children there whose

parents weren’t about. Both of my boys were inside and I was outside

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as it hit. That first one was reasonably big and quite unnerving. I got to

them as quickly as possible and we were all just kind of talking about it, saying thank goodness that’s out of the way, we certainly weren’t expecting the next big one to arrive so soon afterwards. That wasn’t so good, no, that was terrifying.

Anthonie was working from home at the time so he came straight

down on his motorbike. He told me that there had been more

liquefaction at the house and that once more we’d have to pack up and head for my parents’ place. Three weeks this time. My dad and

Anthonie came back up and dug out the liquefaction, dug out the

garage, got everything sort of tidied up as much as they could. Then once the power and water and everything else were okay for the boys we were fine with coming back.

Like a lot of families now we have a plan, I’m a lot more strategic—

if that’s the right word—about what we do as a family. About where we go, about what might happen when I’m dropping one child off

here and then going somewhere else. I try to make sure we’ve got a plan as to what we might do if anything happens and that’s something

we have never really done or even thought about before. I also make sure I’ve got all the medical equipment in the car that I might need

for Theo. That’s important. He has this rare genetic disorder—he’s one of about a hundred people in the world who have it—it’s called Naga Aquafacial Dysistosis, that’s it’s fancy name.

Thinking back to his birth five years ago… yeah, it was not an easy

thing to deal with. The truth is I didn’t deal with it at all well. As a family, we probably reacted to it in much the same way as we have

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responded to the earthquakes, Anthonie threw himself into his work

because that was how he could cope and how he could help, and I threw myself into totally looking after Theo. The result of that is you have two people on different paths, or at least, certainly not on the same

one and that caused a lot of stress. I suffered from reactive depression after Theo, I think he was about three months old when I went to my GP and was put on medication for it. It made a big difference… a huge

difference. Not that it was a quick fix. Not something you can get over and done with in one go. It’s very much an on-going thing and even in

the last year or two I’ve had counselling for that and other issues that have come up. I guess I’m a bit more aware of how I am feeling now

and how things are affecting me. Anthonie tends to push on through with work. Always working and doing and hoping it will all just kind

of settle on the other side. I think initially we were probably in survival

mode when we had Theo, he was doing his thing to get through each

day and I was doing my thing to get through each day, yeah, that probably lasted a good year.

We’ve come through a lot, all of us. We’ve needed some help and

we’ve sought help. It’s been five very hard years, a big struggle, but as Theo gets older and the medical needs are a little less, we’ve both

been able to relax a little bit. Not that these things don’t take a toll.

We’ve become different people as well and it’s almost like we’ve had to find a way back and reconnect, get to know each other again and that’s not an easy thing—hard enough when you don’t have kids, let

alone when you do. Then you throw in a few earthquakes. Not knowing where things are going to, what’s going to happen next, that can play

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with your mind and screw you up. I guess I’d got to the point where

I’d decided not to worry, or at least, I was controlling those worries until this all happened. Suddenly you find yourself thrown back into

a lot of stress and anxiety. Anthonie shows his emotions differently, he’s a doer. Right, we have to do this, we have to do that, got to get

the kids safe and when he has done that he breathes a sigh of relief, his family is secure, out of harm’s way and everything’s fine. Then he’s

back into work mode. Providing is a responsibility he takes seriously

and I am left to talk the kids though it and take care of the medical

stuff. It puts a stress on us we don’t need, as well as having to live apart whenever there is another quake. Me down there and him working in

the city, which is another worry altogether. Even so, the dynamics have changed of late and we are starting to kind of get back to something resembling normal.

Now that we’ve been through so many of these things we are kind

of aware of how each other deals with them and we’ve talked about that. I’ve talked about what I actually need from him during those times and he’s talked about what he needs, and so now we’ve kind of

got a plan for the next time it happens. I really hope there won’t be a

next time, but if our experience so far has been anything to go by there very well may be.

We, like those around us, bought the dream of living in Avonside,

close to town and this lovely river and now we don’t have that anymore.

That has disappeared. Obviously, this is still our home, but part of the word home means being part of a community and I feel like the community has just disappeared. It has been heart breaking really.

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Initially around here we had all been placed in the orange category,

we’d been like that for quite some time, right up until just before Christmas when we went green. So suddenly we are green but across

the other side of the road, where we’ve got friends, they were still orange. Then they went red, and that was my bad day… who was going

to be left? Were we going to be in the middle of a wasteland? And if there are more earthquakes there’ll be more liquefaction and the

Council won’t do anything because there’s no one living there anymore.

So they just kind of… you know, with one announcement, just like that, it was all doom and gloom and quite depressing. We still don’t

know what’s happening with our house yet, whether we are a repair or a rebuild and at the same time you are trying to deal with the insurance

companies, it kind of… it makes me not want to be here. I used to. I wanted to be here, I just… this is our home, this is where our kids were

happy, this is where we were happy and now it’s kind of like, turned into something else.

Being able to talk to others, that’s been a big thing, especially our

neighbours. When you are having a bad day or whatever, being able to wander over and say, ‘Doesn’t this suck,’ or, ‘isn’t this terrible,’ to

people who have gone through it all with you, that’s been important.

Last weekend we went to a housewarming, a family who were once

just across the street from us but have now moved into a new house.

Of course, they are all excited and happy and we are like, yeah, good for

you, and we are pleased for them, we really are, but in my heart there

is another voice saying yeah, and crap for us. It’s a sad thought but sometimes I don’t know if I want to live here anymore.

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Perhaps if all our money wasn’t tied up in this house, if we were

in a different position, we might think of going elsewhere. But then you realise you have a child who is about to start school which is a

real transition time in our lives, not to mention all those other needs, the things we have to deal with on top of everything else. When I

think of all the extra help we are getting… and interestingly, when

the earthquakes happened, I remember saying to Anthonie let’s just go home. I was speaking, of course, of Rakaia. That, to me, was now a

place that felt safe and so that same girl who many years ago couldn’t wait to get out of the place, was really glad it was still there to go back to.

It’s not a good feeling to be sitting here at the mercy of someone

else. At the mercy of someone you don’t know and whatever they

decide to do. It certainly doesn’t feel like what I think, or what I

want, has any importance. What they think, what the government, or EQC, or the insurance companies want, that’s what’s going to happen. Okay, perhaps that’s not the right attitude to have. Maybe if I did go out there and make enough noise or whatever I could

have some effect, but within the confines of our family and what we’ve got going on, there’s not really a lot of spare energy left to do

these sorts of things, and so I end up thinking I have no voice at all.

I guess you might say I’m feeling disillusioned. The word politics, to me, has come to mean a whole lot of people making decisions about things in which I have got no say at all. It’s just them doing what

they do, again. Yeah, we’ve had our various community meetings and

so on, Brendon Burns and some others who were great to talk to but

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somehow, whatever transpired, we never seemed that visible to the

people who are sitting there in their offices and having to deal with it.

It’s not like we did nothing. Anthonie and myself would take it in

turns to phone them. ‘How can we help?’ they’d say.

‘Just making my weekly phone call to see what’s happening with

our claims. These are our claim numbers, where are they up to now?’

We literally had to put it in the diary and phone them every week.

Honestly, it wasn’t until we started doing that, that things actually started happening and that’s the thing that bugs me. They sit there and

say, this is what you have to do and this will happen. So that is what

you do and nothing happens. Nothing happens until you hound them to make something happen.

The word that comes to mind is choice. I feel like we don’t have a

choice as to what to do next. We are completely bound to this house, we are bound to this area, we’ve bound to what all this involves because although we are now designated green, we’ve got major damage. We’ve still got liquefaction under the house and it could be two years, or

more, before things get done. You’re sitting in limbo. I can’t… I’ve got

no… I feel disempowered. In a large way the idea of choice in our life seems to have disappeared. We can’t just say this is what we want to do, so we’re going to do it. We have to sit and wait for someone else to

decide what’s going to happen. That feels like limbo and I can tell you this, limbo is not a nice feeling.

And yes, I’m aware of the bigger picture. I’m aware there are a whole

lot of people out there in a worse position than we are. There are those with homes they can’t live in and at least we have that. There is a roof

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over our heads, and yet you still hear of people every day who have

had their much less urgent repairs done. A friend of the family is

getting their swimming pool repaired next week and it’s not that you

begrudge them getting their work done but you do end up thinking, you know, where’s the priority here. That’s probably one of the biggest

frustrations. In a way I can understand getting those smaller jobs out of the way but it’s the people who obviously have the bigger jobs that are the ones with the biggest need—wouldn’t you think?

The insurance company, EQC, all of it, there doesn’t feel like

there is any prioritising of anything. It doesn’t seem to matter what

claim number they give you, whether you were number one on the list or five thousand and one, it doesn’t seem to mean anything. It’s more like luck of the draw whether they pull yours out today or not

and that’s pretty disheartening, knowing that we are simply sitting around while other people are getting things done. You’re like, how

did they manage to get up that list and we’re still sitting here. Maybe if you at least knew where you were, when they were going to get to you, but we don’t even know that. No communication, and that adds up to a lot of frustration.

I no longer see the future—as in the bigger picture—like I used

to. That has definitely been skewed. It’s more a kind of day-by-day, week-by-week picture these days. With the idea in the back of your mind that there could still be more big events, it’s hard to just live beyond what’s happening right now. I guess in a way there’s a lesson

in that for everyone isn’t there, just enjoy the day that you’ve got and don’t go worrying too much about the future.

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Theo has had a lot of surgeries in the last six months and is starting

school very soon so we’ve got to be thinking about other things. In

a way it’s probably helped to take the focus off the earthquakes and what’s happened and just carry on with what we have to do. Priorities I guess. It certainly makes you aware of what your priorities are, your health, your safety, keeping everybody happy—my family. What’s wonderful is that none of this seems to have affected the kids too

much. We talk about the wobbles when they happen. ‘Oh, oh, there’s another big wobble.’ They love the fact that we’ve got diggers at our

front door and dump trucks going past and so I guess that just brings

us back to reality. This is what it’s like for them and so there is no point in wallowing in what’s going on for us, we just have to get on with it I guess.

Choice would be nice. Getting back to that, being able to decide

what happens next. Having a new house at some point in the future that would be pretty wonderful. More importantly, making sure that the kids are having a happy life and that they are able to do the

things they want to do, have a place where they want to be. Right

now, they can’t even ride their bikes up and down the driveway, it’s

so bumpy, it would be nice just to have those normal everyday things around us again.

You know, when I left Christchurch in my early twenties to go

to London I vowed and declared I would never set foot back here again—ever. I was so unhappy and I thought that was bound up

with Christchurch and all that it was. I know now it wasn’t about Christchurch, it was all about me. When I came back I felt quite at

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home here, I really enjoying being here as an older person, having a family here, getting to know our neighbours, just the ordinary things.

I thought of it in a very different way, a lovely family place to be.

Our kids love the beach so we spend a lot of time there. They loved the model trains at Halswell, they loved Sumner, they loved the

Botanical Gardens—the ducks—there is so much that was appealing

about Christchurch for families. We bought bikes pretty much straight away, put the kid seats on the back and we were off biking around the

river. We used to be there every second day, feeding the ducks and so

on, it was fantastic. This area was… yeah, it was just lovely. Close to town, the bus stopped right outside the door, we’d go into town and

meet Anthonie for lunch… and I know, I know, that’s all changed… all changed, yeah, all changed and I’m going to have to get used to it.

I’m kind of coming around to the idea that this is going to be the

place we’ll be for quite a while to come. Straight after the earthquakes a big part of me would really liked to have got out of here. I don’t think

I would have left Christchurch but I would have gone to a part that

wasn’t as affected as we are here. But today I’m starting to feel more

positive about the future of this area. I think if we can ride out the next five years or so it will start to get back to what it was when we first

came. I haven’t forgotten the dream we bought with this house, it was

special—it was our home. And okay today the wind comes through it, there are draughts everywhere and a hundred other things I would love to have fixed but most important of all—when you get right down to

it—I still have my family, we all still have each other, and that is most important thing of all don’t you think.

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