Young journalist Martin Moore, passing through Waiheke during the summer, reflects on life as a student in Christchurch this last year. And what it’s like when feeling safe has become strangely alien.

The night before I wrote this I was woken just before 3am by the building shaking and the walls creaking. A 5.0 I later found out. It was the first quake I’d felt since I returned to Christchurch from a two-week holiday at home in the North island. 

I’d actually been lucky to get away in the first place. My plane got off the ground just a couple of hours before the series of large earthquakes on December 23, where-upon the airport was shut down for inspection. 

Going home felt almost like going to a different country, and it wasn’t until I was home for a couple of days that I felt something inside me start to relax, a tension that had been there so consistently since last February that I hadn’t even realised I was carrying it. 

It’s an odd thing, the effects of carrying the stress of looming disaster for so long. When the earth moves in Christchurch I no longer panic, I just move to a doorway and wait. But once I was home, all it took was a truck going by and my heart started kicking wildly. It took me a while to understand why that was, and I realised it was because after coming home I actually felt safe for the first time in months.

 But that sense of safety was a fragile thing. It worried me that feeling safe had become so alien. 

In many ways Christchurch has stayed shattered since that day in February last year. It certainly feels like it’s been broken out of synch with the rest of the country; with itself as well for that matter. 

Some suburbs took extraordinary amounts of damage, walls cracking and silt from liquefaction covering the ground while just up the street was hardly touched at all. Over the months that followed, different parts of the city seem to move at different speeds. In one area new buildings flew up while in another shop owners still weren’t able to get back into their businesses for months after the quake.  

But there was a flip side to it as well. When something breaks there’s the chance to rebuild it better, new possibilities open up. 

Much has been said about the community spirit that sprung up following the quakes. I remember people being turned away from the student volunteer army because they’d run out of space on the buses. But that sense of camaraderie wasn’t just local; every day donations and offers of support and aid poured in from around the country, and you could see it buoy everyone’s spirits to know that the rest of New Zealand was behind them. 

There was a wonderful feeling when everyone mucked in to help each other. You could talk to anyone, and everyone had a story. Each story illustrated to me one aspect of the often deeply contradictory experience of the past year. 

I spoke to a man who lived in one of the hardest hit eastern suburbs. Liquefaction had all but buried his street and he spent the first few days not leaving the house. Watching the news (once the power returned), all he saw were images of destruction and so he thought the entirety of Christchurch had been hit just as hard. Several days later when he left to get food, he saw that around the corner from his street the damage abruptly stopped. He had been living in a little oasis of destruction thinking that the whole city had been that way. 

A lecturer at the University of Canterbury told me that 2011’s class’s results were the best he’d seen. Without the usual resources and assurances that things would be taken care of for them, students had realised that if they were going to pass then it was going to be up to them. They took ownership of their own education, working together and improvising where necessary to make sure they learned what they needed to. 

One night I was walking home from a community music night. A local church had put it together so that families could get their children out of the house and take their minds off their troubles. It was a nice thing to do because most of the entertainment around town was shut at the time. Two hours in, a particularly nasty aftershock hit and most parents decided to head home. There really was no getting away from the quakes. On my way home it started to rain and I began to get the feeling that this really wasn’t my day when a bus driver pulled over and picked me up despite there not being a bus-stop.

As she drove she told me what it was like trying to drive during an earthquake - like the ground turning into water apparently. She said she had stopped earlier when an old woman had stumbled from her home crying to give her a hug. The elderly had been having a hard time adjusting. Many had lived in Christchurch their whole lives only to see it change violently in their twilight years. 

It’s easy to let your spirits drop, but it’s small things like a hug for an upset stranger, or stopping to give some poor sod walking home in the rain a ride, that are like little lights in the dark. 

It’s easy to see the open patches in town where buildings used to be, the cracks running up the walls. But it’s funny the way little things can completely change your perspective, how hearing about a young family being given a place to stay up North for a break from the quakes, or a shipment of teddies bearing messages can make you smile. 

And all it takes is that smile and you start noticing the sound of hammers and the sight of new buildings springing up.

The quakes of the past year shattered Christchurch, but it’s been my fortune to watch the citizens of Christchurch come together to rebuild it into something that could just be a little bit better. They’re tired, but sometimes all it takes is one of those little lights in the dark to remind you that the rest of the country is behind you. So if you’re one of those people who got behind us, I just want to say thanks, it can make more of a difference than you might think.• Martin Moore