And I don't even have anything to show you in return for your faithful reading! My camera cord has been
BUT. I have been busy. After getting back from Singapore in the middle of February, I was home for a total of seven days before I jetted off again.
This time to a much more
My cousin Ashley (we're 2 months and 1 day apart exactly) got married last weekend, and so Mum & I flew to Dunedin for her wedding. Dunedin, at the bottom of New Zealand's south island, is basically as close to Antarctica as you can get without travelling on one of those icebreaker ships.
Fittingly, as a welcome, the city decided it was be fun to start pouring rain right as we drove off from the airport. Thanks very much, New Zealand weather.
We spent our first afternoon acclimatising to the weather (me) and shopping like mad (Mum).
The next day we both headed out to do some shopping on the main street. After blazing through all the shops that the one shopping mall in town had, we met my Uncle Jeff at his work in the council chambers and had coffee and caught up on all the family news.
An hour later Mum & I were in a clothing store and stopped in our tracks to listen to the radio playing through the store's speakers. We knew there'd been an earthquake in NZ, but thought it was a relatively minor one, such as are common in the land of the long white cloud.
What stopped us right then and there, t-shirts in hand, was the words "there have been reports of deaths amongst the rubble".
Amidst the frivolousness of $20 t-shirts and $15 shorts, I felt a deep sense of "none of this stuff matters". Right there, in the shop, I felt silly for spending my entire day shopping for things that were really inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
Four hours drive away, in a city I had visited many times, people were dead, dying, seriously injured, scared and trapped.
Four hours away families were scared and fearful for their loved ones in Christchurch's CBD.
Four hours away mothers ran barefoot for half an hour to check on their children at school.
Four hours away people in an office building had to resort to sliding down the outside of a building on a rope weighted only by the mass of another man.
Four hours away strangers banded together to physically peel off the roof of a car, only to find the driver hadn't survived.
All of this we watched on the 24/7 streaming news coverage that night, news coverage that ended up running for three days straight. If you haven't already seen pictures, the city looks like a warzone. It literally looks like someone has dropped a bomb into the centre of the city.
In the following days, Christchurch became the dominant topic of conversation. In cafes, book stores, supermarkets and pharmacies, you could almost always hear someone talking to someone else about the earthquake. Being the next largest city, almost everyone in Dunedin knows someone who lives or has lived in Christchurch. And so many of those people have had their homes or workplaces wrecked by the force of the quake that was struck so suddenly.
What was amazing to see was how New Zealand responded. Almost immediately, medical personnel were dispatched to the city. Ordinary citizens loaded up their cars and drove to help out. As supermarkets posted signs declaring they were out of milk, or bread, or toilet paper, or flour because of the situation in Christchurch, students organised for Dunedinites to make hundreds of packaged lunches, and shipped them to help feed rescue workers.
Being in New Zealand at the time of the earthquake was a little scary and disarming. But it was also amazing and very humbling. I didn't feel the earthquake (although I felt one aftershock in the middle of the night a few days later), but what I felt most was the compassion and empathy people had for those affected in Christchurch.
The world could do to take a page or two out of New Zealand's book.
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