Silt and Sausages

My mother, Drina, has departed her broken home in Dallington and joined the swelling throng of earthquake escapees in Ashburton. Among her observations of living through six months of tremors, one recurring thought is her helplessness in the grip of such random and unassailable forces.
Drina has a long memory. The last time her world fell apart was in 1940 when Hitler’s armies threw themselves across the South Willemsvaart canal and plundered her sleepy village in rural Holland. The Nazis remained for four years, but the earthquakes are far more terrifying.
At least with the Nazis, Drina says, you could see your enemy, hear him coming, grasp the length and breadth of him. A set of rules was imposed and you learned to live within them, subvert them, find the points of weakness that allowed you to reclaim some small measure of control.
There are no rules with earthquakes – and no control. Nothing prepares you for the herculean fist that smashes your foundations and has you cowering beneath a computer desk while your possessions rage through the house and the building bucks like a barrel ride. Nothing eases the small knife of terror that runs through every moment of waiting, anticipating the next after-shock, never trusting that which should be most trustworthy – the ground beneath your feet.
Helplessness, we discover, is not confined to those at the centre of the disaster. For us at the margins, whose homes are intact and lives largely untouched, there is also a feeling of helplessness, of watching a beautiful city and her people, our families and friends, torn and broken.
The desire to reassert some degree of control in these terrifying events is behind the great outpouring of assistance we are witnessing. We pare helplessness down to a single passionate syllable – help. “How can I help?” is our cry, and we come up with twenty clever ideas.
Generosity is not a uniquely kiwi trait but we have our own way of going about it. In an age of international aid teams and disaster specialists some communities might be inclined to keep away and let the professionals manage the response. Not us. Beneath the official rescue effort a thousand acts of kindness are blossoming. We bake, give and shovel. We ‘toot for tucker’ and dig into our wallets. We load the barbie on the back of the truck and cook sausages in Linwood Avenue for days on end.
Shovelling silt has become the gold standard of giving. It requires no specialist training, no permission to cross a cordon, no heavy equipment. It reaches deeply into the battered communities that have not yet seen a hard hat or USAR vest. It can be highly organised – the student volunteers, the Farmy Army – or touchingly informal, like the parent at my school who took his seven year old son to New Brighton on Sunday where the pair of them shovelled silt off the driveways of strangers.
We give because we hate watching people suffer, but also to ease our own suffering. This is our disaster too. Whatever ‘new normal’ arises in Christchurch we know our lives will also never be quite the same again and that knowledge makes us both angry and frightened.
Drina is right, the earthquake has taken not just our homes and streets, but also our most fundamental human trait - our will. The long, painful, difficult process of restoring Christchurch will not be just about renewing buildings and infrastructure but about reasserting our will over our environment, and over our deepest fears.