All Shaken Up

Life has been pretty nice and routine for me and Liz here for the last week or so. Our schedule had been fairly full for a while, so it has been nice to relax at home and enjoy the freedom that an empty schedule brings.
Sadly, though, Saturday morning brought anything but relaxation! I was just waking up gradually and fidgeting with my cellphone (turning off the alarms that hadn’t gone off yet and so on), when Liz – who had been up and turning on the computer in the lounge – came into the bedroom and told me to get up and call home because there had been an earthquake in my hometown of Christchurch! At first I just sort of fobbed it off because earthquakes aren’t uncommon at all in New Zealand, or Japan for that matter… but Liz repeated and said that it was a “big” earthquake and that it looked “really bad”…

I got up straight away and we checked out what information we could find quickly online, and then I called home to make sure everyone was ok. THANKFULLY, the earthquake struck at 4:30am or so, so there weren’t many people out and about in the city. Had it been a few hours later, there could well have been a large number of severe injuries and deaths caused by falling bricks and buildings etc.

My friends and family were ok. I was so relieved! My beloved city, however, is pretty badly damaged. About 100,000 houses have been damaged or destroyed, an entire suburb has sunk partially into the ground, and now the bulldozers are in town demolishing those buildings which are deemed unfixable. Aftershocks are still shaking everyone in more ways than one, and some of them are pretty big indeed, causing more even damage to homes and our irreplacable heritage buildings. Only this morning (four days after the main quake) a magnitude 5.1 aftershock rattled the city...it was only 6km deep!

But again, as horrifying as it is to think of the damage, and how long it’s going to take to fix it all up (years, I’d say! If they ever get enough money) it’s still a miracle that nobody died!! That is something we must be truly thankful for! The earthquake was the same size as the one that devastated Haiti not too long ago… but we had NO deaths!
Our thoughts are with friends and family in and around Christchurch as they clean up, rebuild, camp out in shelters, stay with friends, pitch in to help others, and generally try their best to move on with life. Take care!

After such a serious entry, I feel it’s time to share a little humour out of all this… Mum told me that when the earthquake struck, one of her hens got such a fright she laid an egg!! Haha

In other news, it’s been a hideously hot summer here this year. Most days averaging in the high 30s, and very little rain. Today there’s actually a typhoon passing over, causing a fair amount of rain to fall, but it’s only a very weak typhoon, so nothing to worry about at all.

Both my school and Liz’s schools are busy practicing for their school sports days, which will be held this weekend. I’m sure one of us will write something about that next week. Keep watching this space!