Of course I was going to join the volunteers again. Helping out in the city made me feel a lot better. When I’m having a holiday I can enjoy doing nothing, otherwise I prefer to work. Sitting in the university without any mood for traveling seemed more than depressing.
Apart from making myself useful and keeping me occupied, it really let me appreciate just how much destruction and devastation there has been all around Christchurch after the earthquake.
I got up early to make myself scrambled eggs again for breakfast so that I could go and get some gas for Harry beforehand. The gas station had long queues and it ended up taking me 20 minutes to finally get to the front of the line. When I got there I found out that they had restrictions and I was only allowed to get $50 worth of petrol. Still, with what was already in there I now had most of a tank.
The long wait had made me late getting back to the university but I called ahead to N. and was told that instead of going straight into the city there was now a meeting at 9:30 before leaving and that I would be fine. I made it back in time and we were told that Lincoln University would have to officially register for volunteering, so they couldn’t send us in one group.
Of course we were all free to take the shovels from the university and go and volunteer our help as members of the public not as representatives of Lincoln University. We decided to put shovels in the back of Harry and join in as members of the public.
Unfortunately I had left the key turned on while waiting for another car to follow and when we went to start Harry again nothing happened. The other people in the car got out and helped push Harry while I jump started him. We got him going, but the car we were meant to be following had left already so we followed another car instead. We went closer and closer to the city center and it turned out that they were going to help clear mud at the house of the parents of one of the people in their car. We decided to help them, but it was only a small courtyard to clear so we couldn’t all work in it at once. Some of us helped, the others waited at the car for us to finish.
Eventually we got a phone call from one of the people organizing the volunteer groups to ask where we were and give us directions back to the main group. On the way to find them we got to drive around the outskirts of the city center (which is still closed to the public). It was my first chance to see the real destruction of the inner city buildings. The huge old cathedral opposite the Kiwi Basecamp Hostel was in ruins with piles of bricks lying around it and all of the windows collapsed inside. A beautiful two storied wooden house just down the road which I had noticed was closed off after the earthquake last September was now lying on the ground. Police and military officers stood guard at all the cordons to the city center and we even saw a tank on one of the roads.
Despite getting directions we went to the wrong street first but eventually we found our way back to join the rest of the volunteers again. We spent the afternoon clearing more streets and I got to clear the mud from one of the huge drains. Eventually we finally finished for the day and all got back into Harry to head back home to Lincoln. As soon as I started to reverse out of the park the girls in the car cried out and told me that I had hit the car behind me. I stopped and went back to check if I had done any damage. I didn’t feel anything and couldn’t see any damage, the people in the other car even ignored me like nothing had happened, so I was pretty sure the girls were wrong and got back in the car. Nothing was easy today.
When we got back to Lincoln I dropped the other volunteers off and collected money from some of the students to get them some more things from the supermarket (mainly alcohol!). At the supermarket the bread restrictions had finally been lifted. Besides the two bigger aftershocks in the night everything seems back to normal.
