Driving through the damaged city is akin to a trip down any street in downtown Kabul.
As outsiders, here for the first time since February's fatal quake and the many many since, its, quite simply, distressing; disturbing. The news images do not capture what is really the truth here...that the heart and soul of the city is, simply, gone. Shut down, broken, boarded up, cordoned off, pulled or fallen down.
The streets in and around the CBD are silent, as if in quiet mourning for what took place there on that day in February. We are here in the weekend with the diggers and excavators resting roadside in and around the bricks, the rubble, the ruin. It takes your breath away. The awful, complicit silence. The few people who wander around like us - wanting yet not wanting to see - are dumbfounded. Some people who live here have still not yet seen this destruction, can't bring themselves to 'sightsee' like others are. Each have their own stories to tell, I eavesdrop on a local telling a Canadian tourist where she was that day, and what happened to her. Others hold onto the fence and simply stare, like we do, standing beneath the aptly named Bridge of Remembrance gazing hopelessly on Cashel Mall or what's left of it. You can still see coffee cups sitting on outside tables on The Strip. Everything suspended in time, still as it was that fatal February day.
In other suburbs its business as usual, yet not really, with whole blocks of shops gone, or the odd building still in a state of collapse - fluro status updates slashed across the door or stickers plastered over entrances or police danger tape cordoning it off. Bizarre.
And, understandably, its the only topic of conversation. From taxi drivers to cafe staff, locals anywhere and everywhere still living here, still surviving here and in ways only known to them, have made it work and dare I say, made it normal.
Even for us here in Christchurch for our sisters kidney transplant - the whole operation is dependant on whether or not there is 'another one'. We just need to get through this day of transplant surgery - our hearts and hopes for her suspended until the surgery is over, quake free.
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